For ninety years, the primary record of the genealogy of our branch of the Sandford family has been the book Robert Sandford and His Wife Ann Adams Sandford with Some of Their Descendants, 1615-1930, written by Josephine Sandford Ware.  This 85 page account has been floating around our family since its 1930 publication.  It can easily be found today on the internet.

Josephine (1865-1950) was a great granddaughter of John Sandford, the patriarch of the other Sandford branch to have left Bridgehampton, Long Island before the American Revolution to take up residence in Topsham, Maine.  Josephine was the same generation as our great grandfather Edward T. Sandford, and is our 4th cousin.  At the end of the 1890s she moved with her husband from Maine to Durango, Colorado where they raised at least one son.  She died in Los Angeles, but is buried in the Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.  It seems likely that our grandfather Joe Sandford knew her (he certainly knew of her) and contributed his and his father’s stories to the book.

The book follows the standard format established for family genealogies over the past 150 years.  It begins with the three Sandford brothers (Robert, Thomas and Andrew) coming to Connecticut with uncle Andrew Warner around 1634, then follows Robert’s line down through the centuries.  One branch of the tree ends with grandfather Joe Sandford and names his first three children including our father Gordon Thomas Sandford (with a typo—he was born in 1929 not 1926).  

In 2019, Janelle and I traveled to Bridgehampton to see the Sag Pond bridge and other sites.  There we met seventh cousin Ann Sandford, who has written books on Bridgehampton and her branch of Sandfords, and Julie Greene from the historical society.  It was good visit and came with a bonus—our introduction to another Sandford genealogy, The Sandford/Sanford Families of Long Island, Their Ancestors and Descendants written by Grover Merle Sanford of Farmingdale, New York, published in 1975.  (Spellings of the name alternate with and without the extra “d” in various branches of the family.)  It quickly became evident that this was the preferred source used by the Bridgehampton folks, so I photographed several pages (and have since copied the whole thing from the Library of Congress) with the intent of comparing notes.

The first sign of trouble was in a paragraph on the original Robert Sandford account we read while sitting in Julie’s office:

“Robert’s wife was named Ann, who was not the daughter of Jeremy Adams, as sometimes stated.  The only clue to her identity is the statement made by Winthrop in 1667 that Robert Sanford’s wife was a sister of Thomas Skidmore’s wife of Fairfield Conn….“

To make a long story short in terms of deciding who to believe on this and other discrepancies, it’s pretty clear that Grover’s (with no disrespect intended I will refer to these genealogies by the authors’ first names, for brevity, since the last names are the same) accounts are better substantiated.  His version is written 45 years later than Josephine’s, with full cognizance of her earlier conclusions, and he is very careful about noting his discrepancies with her work, and providing substantiating evidence to back up his conclusions.

With this quickly evaporated the notion that Jeremy Adams, whose name appears on the stone column listing Hartfords original settlers, was 8th great grandmother Ann’s father and therefore our 9th great grandfather.  Gone also was the notion that we might be President John Adams’ 4th cousin.  But the thing that really bothered me was that this also challenged the story of Zachariah Sandford and his role in the Connecticut Charter Oak incident. 

The story hinges on Zachariah having inherited the inn from his grandfather, Jeremy Adams, who is known to have been its previous owner.  If Robert’s wife Ann was not the daughter of Jeremy, then Jeremy would not be Zachariah’s grandfather, and how would the inn possibly have come to be owned by Zachariah? 

In this case, It only took a few hours of research to find an alternative solution, well supported by evidence, that Zachariah had actually married Sarah Willet, Jeremy’s granddaughter, so the inn had come to Zach via his grandfather-in-law, not his grandfather.  

Uncle Zach’s role in Connecticut history was safe, however, Josephine’s genealogy took a direct hit (including the very title of the book claiming Robert’s marriage to Ann Adams).  

Josephine humbly opens her book with the following line:

“That there are errors in the work is probable, but let him who discovers any be thankful there are no more than appear.  The editor would be grateful to have corrections and desired changes sent to her that they may be used in a later edition.“

I am thankful for this, but more thankful for the full scope of cousin Josephine’s work (of which there was no later edition).  

Alas there is another error in Josephine’s book, this one more significant and difficult to resolve.  Upcoming posts will go into this in great detail.

Third great grandfather Thomas Gelston Sandford was born in Portland, Maine in 1781, the middle of seven children of Thomas and Jerusha Gelston Sandford.  He was married at age 32 to Maria Halsey Head from Warren, Maine.  The 1783 marriage notice cites Thomas Gelston as a resident of Topsham (the ‘h’ is silent), so he must have moved to Topsham sometime between coming of age and marrying Maria, say between 1800 and 1813.  His father Thomas died in 1811 in Portland, and this may have played a role in the timing.

Topsham is a small town, even today.  You only have to look at a map to get a good sense of why it exists.  Located near the confluence of two major navigable rivers, the Androscoggin to the south, flowing eastward through from the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the Kennebec River to the north, originating near Québec and flowing southward through Augusta.  Thirty miles north of Portland (originally named Falmouth), Topsham is a logical base camp for a population expanding north from Massachusetts looking for new opportunities on the frontier.  It sits right between all those trees and all that water, and was in fact a shipbuilding center from its origins, which is probably why the ship-owning Sandford family wound up there.  

The railroad didn’t come through from Portland until 1851, so for Thomas Gelston and the next two generations, travel from Portland to Topsham must have been by boat.

The Sandford house in Topsham sits atop a hill overlooking the Androscoggin river.  Built in 1809, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and has been owned by several prominent Topsham citizens.   Thomas Gelston Sandford appears to have been its second owner. 

Maine achieved statehood in 1820.  As half of the Missouri compromise, Maine was and remains staunchly proud of its anti-slavery stance, balancing the pro-slavery position of Missouri which achieved statehood at about the same time.  Topsham was a part of the underground railroad, a last stop on the coast before proceeding inland towards Canada.  The town history boasts of a series of tunnels between safe houses, some of which must have been within a quarter mile of the Thomas Gelston homestead.

Like his father, Thomas Gelston Sandford kept his own log book documenting business transactions throughout his life.  Like his father’s, Thomas Gelstons’s book is preserved by the Maine Historical Society.

Thomas Gelston and Maria Sandford had seven children between 1814 and 1829, the eldest James Head Sandford, our 2nd grandfather.

Family life in Topsham must have been very difficult.  The families of both Thomas Gelston Sandford and James Head Sandford suffered spates of early death that must have required a great deal of shuffling among families and siblings to care for young children who had lost their parents.  Maria died at the age of 35, in 1831.  Thomas Gelston would die a year later, at the age of 51 when James Head, the oldest of seven, was only 18 years old.  

In a previous post, I mentioned that there was at least one other Sandford branch from Long Island living in Topsham at the same time as our branch.  John Sandford was a cousin of fourth great grandfather Thomas Sandford of Portland, John being eight years younger than Thomas.  He was the son of Captain John Sandford, a member of the First Regiment of Minute Men of Suffolk County, Long Island, who is recorded to have been one of the first Southampton signatories of the 1775 Articles of Association pledging loyalty to the Colonies.  John the son moved from Southhampton to Topsham in 1776, leapfrogging his cousin Thomas who had moved to Portland 8 years earlier.  When Thomas Gelston Sandford arrived in Topsham between 1800 and 1813, the John Sandford branch had already been there for 25-35 years.  

As various Sandford children lost parents at early ages in the first half of the 1800s, the existence of two separate Sandford clans perhaps allowed the families to rely on each other to look after their children.

James Head Sandford married Dorothy Burton in 1837 when he was 23.   They had two children, our great grandfather Edward T. and his twin brother James, in 1840.  Dorothy also died young at age 30 in 1847 when the twins were only seven.  

James Head remarried after Dorothy’s death to Arabella Pierce.  They had a son, George, Edward Thomas’ half brother in 1850.   They would resettle in Minnesota after Edward Thomas had set out on his own.  The 1870 census shows James, Arabella, and George living in Wabasha Minnesota, 50 miles southeast of Saint Paul on the Wisconsin border (coincidentally, just 75 miles from Mankato). James is listed as a farmer in this census. James and son George would eventually move to southern California.  James died in 1898 and is buried in Corona–he probably lived with his son Edward T and grandson Joe in his final years.  George would settle in the Long Beach area, and started a parallel branch of Sandfords that would be in that region for several generations, just a few miles away from the family of Earl and Saada Sandford Beck, Edward Thomas’s oldest daughter.  Many of George Sandford’s descendants eventually migrated to the San Diego area.

There does not seem to be much to have kept Edward T. in Topsham.  In Joe Sandford’s narrative of his father’s life he opens with:

His uncle Thomas Sandford owned a fleet of clipper ships that sailed the seven seas.  The opening of the Civil War in the United States found father in Chinese waters on one of these ships serving as First Officer.

Joe Sandford, 1966

This Thomas Sandford is most likely Thomas H Sandford, James Head Sandford’s brother, two years younger, although were Thomas Sandfords everywhere and it could possibly be a distant uncle, even one from John Sandford’s clan.  

Summarizing, Edward T. Sandford was born in 1840 and lost his mother in 1847 at age 7.  His father remarried quickly and had son George, Edward T’s half brother, in 1850.  Somewhere around 1860 Edward T. was already a First Officer on his uncle’s ship in the waters near China.  He got word of the Civil War and decided he wanted to be part of that. Much more to come on the life of Edward Thomas Sandford in future posts.

Topsham’s Riverview Cemetery sits on a hilltop overlooking the Androscoggin River, a quarter mile down the road from the Thomas Gelston Sandford house.  Near the entrance is a family plot which includes the graves of Thomas Gelston Sandford, his wife Maria, and James’ wife Dorothy.  (James is buried in Corona.)  Other Sandfords can be found nearby and it would take a lot of research to sort out everyone from the two Sandford branches.  Next to Dorothy is the grave of James’ younger brother William Horvey Sandford, 1819-1827.

After Long Island and before Vermont and California, four generations of Sandford ancestors lived in Maine between 1768 and the 1860s, first in Portland, Maine (originally known as “Falmouth” or “Falmouth in Casco Bay” to distinguish it from Falmouth, Massachusetts on Cape Cod), later in Topsham (the ‘h’ is silent) thirty miles to the north. 

The great grandfather of our great grandfather Edward T. Sandford was Captain Thomas Sandford.   The nature of his title Captain is unclear—it is cited in a few places including city maps showing his residence and in the newspaper notice of his death, but does not seem to have been used in his daily life or business transactions.  Although he spent most of his life as a ship owner and a businessman, there is no evidence that he was ever a sea captain.  In other cases in that era, the title came from being a part of the militia, so perhaps that was the case with Thomas.

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, at least two of our ancestral family branches left Bridgehampton, Long Island to settle in Maine, at different times. The moves were probably combinations of wanting to pursue new opportunities and wanting to evade the increasing tensions with the British on Long Island before and during the Revolution.

The British occupied Long Island in August 1776 culminating with their victory in the Battle of Brooklyn.  George Washington fled south to Pennsylvania to fight another day.  (His escape was aided by a regiment from Maryland, credited with sacrificing to delay the British advance.)  Long island remained under the thumb of British oppression for the remainder of the war.

Around 1768, Thomas Sandford at the age of 24 fell-in with the prosperous Arthur Howell (age 43), who had recently married Jerusha Gelston, the daughter of Judge Hugh Gelston from Southampton.  The three left Long Island to set up a thriving shipping business in Falmouth (at the time still considered part of the Massachusetts colony). Arthur and Jerusha Howell lived at the corner of Back and King Streets, the center of town at that time, Thomas living nearby.  Today, this is the intersection of Congress and India Streets and is a mile east of the Portland city center.

In 1773 Howell, at the age of 48, died unexpectedly while away on a business trip.  Thomas, as Howell’s business associate, was the executor of his estate.  Within the same year Thomas and Jerusha were married, together to become our fourth great grandparents.  A byproduct of this sequence of events was that a great deal of Howell’s substantial estate, including the Howell business and homestead, fell to Thomas and Jerusha. 

If Thomas left Long Island to evade the British, it did not work.  In 1775 most of the town of Falmouth was destroyed by the British Navy, including Thomas and Jerusha’s home, which they subsequently rebuilt. Thomas is recorded as having signed a November 1776 petition to the British for reparations, the losses from the Howell/Sandford estate totaling £534+£184.

Thomas and Jerusha would have seven children in Falmouth/Portland between 1774 and 1778. Thomas Gelston Sandford, our third great grandfather, was the fourth child and first son, born in 1781.

It was in 1786 that the citizens of Falmouth established a new adjacent town and named it Portland, which would dominate from that point forward. Thomas Sandford was a signatory of the Petition For the Incorporation of Portland to the Massachusetts Legislature.

Thomas Sandford would live in Portland with Jerusha for the rest of his life, dying there in 1811.  Jerusha would live another 26 years, dying in 1837 in Springfield Mass. She probably lived with the family of her eldest daughter, Mary Sandford Dwight, who died in Springfield in 1822.

The Maine Historical Society in Portland has preserved several artifacts from the Sandfords in Maine.  Captain Thomas Sandford kept a log book from his business for many years.

There is also a 1792 shipping contract, a routine boilerplate document that would have been signed before sending a ship out on voyage, stating the owners and crew of the ship, its mission, and the terms of the voyage.  Captain Thomas Sandford was co-owner of the ship, and signed this document.

The story will continue with Thomas Gelston Sandford in Topsham.

Sometimes the answer is right in front of your nose. The tree from the 2002 family reunion says “Edward”. If there was a more familiar form, like “Ed”, it would surely be there next to “Annie”. So “E.T.” for formal situations, “Edward” for informal.

There are big mysteries in genealogical research and there are small ones.  Great grandfather Edward Thomas Sandford lived a life spanning 82 years and a half dozen major chapters, any one of which would rank at the “good as it gets” level for rating of family stories.  It would take years of research to get to the bottom of everything, and the research is all the more alluring because many of the things he did in his life left excellent documentation trails including records from the War Department, the State Department, newspaper articles and information left by our grandfather about his father.  Many posts on his life will follow.

But right now, I am focussed on a small mystery—what to call our great grandfather?    Today there is surely nobody alive who met him and, even if there was, he or she would now be 100 years old would have been a very small child at the time of the last encounter.  For a clear answer, we are dependent on written records combined with reasoning.

E.T. Sandford’s full name was Edward Thomas Sandford, born in 1840 in Topsham, Maine, and died in 1922 in Ontario, California.  He signed most official correspondence as E.T. Sandford, and I have come to think of him as E.T.   Our grandfather, Edward Joseph Sandford, followed the same pattern, being known formally as E.J. Sandford.  Being used to the E.J. convention, using E.T. comes naturally.   There is ample documentation to support his use of E.T, for example many of the letters he wrote to William Seward in the 1860s were signed this way. Other times, his signature was shortened to E. Sandford.

Later in his life, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, a series of newspaper articles consistently refer to him as the Rev. E.T. Sandford.

So “E.T. Sandford” and sometimes just “E. Sandford” were used in most formal situations. But what did people who knew him call him?  As a direct descendent and, as far as I know, the only person actively involved in figuring out the story of his life, I feel entitled to know the answer and to address him this way.

Our grandfather was known to friends and family as Joe throughout his life.  Being the son of a man with the same first name, Edward, it would make sense that the usage of “Joe” came about at the very beginning to avoid confusion with his father.  It makes sense that E.T. would have gone by “Edward” as E.J. went by “Joe”.

E.T.’s father was James Head Sandford, and his grandfather Thomas Gelston Sandford, both of Topsham, both middle names being the maiden names of their mothers.  There was no first name conflict between E.T. and his father nor his grandfather, thus no evident reason why he would have gone by any name other than Edward.

E.T. had an uncle Thomas to whom he was close enough to have committed to sail around the world on one of his ships at a very early age. The name Thomas is very common in the family–it was the first name of E.T’s grandfather, great grandfather, and other ancestors and (great) uncles including the Thomas who was among the three brothers who first sailed to America around 1634.  E.T’s mother was Dorothy Young Burton, so the tradition of using the mother’s maiden name as a middle name was not continued with him.  The abundance of Thomas’s in E.T’s family tree suggests that his middle name was chosen to honor one or more of these ancestors, but also suggests that his family would have avoided the confusion of calling him by that name in everyday life.

For these combined reasons, I believe E.T. would have gone by “Edward” throughout his life.

Now the question of whether to shorten Edward to Ed?  Going the other direction, E.J. (Joe) Sandford’s first son, E.T’s grandson (and our uncle), was also an “Edward”, Edward James Sandford— there were three Edwards in a row—and he went by “Ned”.  E.T. died six months before Ned was born—there was no overlap—but our grandparents may still have wanted to have a name distinction, leading to the use of the name Ned.  In view of the family history of using “Ned” for the formal Edward and “Joe” for the formal Joseph, there seems to have been a gravitation toward the use of short nicknames, and so it seems reasonable that E.T. / Edward would have gone by “Ed”. 

I have found no records that definitively answer this question.  In his description of his father written in 1966, Joe Sandford refers to letters that E.T. wrote home during the Civil War.  I do not know the whereabouts of these letters but they would surely provide an answer, and would be fascinating in many other ways (think of a Ken Burns-style narration:  “My darling Sarah….”).

I plan to look for the will of E.T.’s father, James Head Sandford, who died in Corona, California in 1898.  It could contain a phrase like “to my son ___ I leave…”.  

One more observation…   E.T. did not spend a lot of time in close family situations between going to sea as a teenager and settling in Vermont at the age of 40+.  He was home very little of the time.  He had a first wife, Sarah, who was ill much of the time, but he didn’t see too much of her.  He did not start a family until age 50 with his second wife.  Whatever name his family and first wife used with him may not have been used very much during the middle part of his life, when his circumstances tended to be more formal and transitory—in this period he may not have had a lot of close relationships with people who would address him informally.

Having no other evidence or reasoning by which to go at this time, I conclude he used “Edward” and probably “Ed” in familiar situations.  I will mostly continue to use the formal E.T. in this blog because it is a unique, unambiguous designation in the family tree which matches most of the historical records available on his life.

A final comment on genealogical research as I have come to understand it.  Among several things, “Bridging the Silences” refers to filling in gaps between available historical records to understand what probably went on and developing it into a story line that is honest, accurate, and interesting.  There are many situations where records simply do not exist to answer a question directly, but logical reasoning, linked with other insights into the life being studied, is useful to determine the likely answer.  Short of finding an undiscovered stash of records or letters in an attic somewhere, this is often the best that can be done with the available record. In such cases, I intend always to identify my conclusions as “likely based on reasoning” vs. “proven”, but I also am comfortable embracing these types of well-reasoned conclusions in my overall understanding of the truth regarding our ancestry. 

There are some much bigger family mysteries where we will need to rely on this kind of reasoning to find the answers. These will be discussed in future posts.