Who did Mary Marry?
"The Bay City Rollers"
You'll have to excuse my title line, that was the name of a "one hit wonder" band from Scotland in the
early '70s ("Saturday Night" being their only hit), they were probably before your time. But it was either
that or "Weekend at Birneys."
I was looking at (John) Newton Deuel in the 1880 census for Manhattan, and I just can't get away
from Birneys:
Newton Deuel, Single, 68, no occupation, NY/NY/NY
Mary D. Berney, Niece, Widowed, 37, NY/NY/NY
Penelope Deuel, Niece, Single, 34, NY/NY/NY
I wonder if Penelope could be the "Nellie" Deuel that Hyatt mentions, although she isn't married to an
Osborne here. I see zilch on IGI, ancestry.com, etc. for either Penelope or Mary.
This Mary may be too young to be married to a son of James Gillespie Birney, it seems to me. JGB had
only two sons that survived the Civil War, James and William, and their wives (Amanda Moulton and
Catherine Hoffman, respectively), are still alive for the 1880 census.
So I was thinking that Hyatt may have confused JGB with his son James Birney, who was acting
Governor of Michigan.
This is from an article written in 1873 about the younger James Birney:
"After serving as a judge, Mr. Birney returned to the practice of law. In 1871, he established the Bay
City Chronicle, a weekly Republican paper. In June of 1873 he commenced publication of the Morning
Chronicle." Previously he had started the Bay City Press, the first newspaper published in Bay County.
"In 1857, Bay County was organized as a county by the state, and he participated in bringing this
about." The article also talks about the early pioneer days, and his dealing with Indians.
"In 1867 he joined with other businessmen to construct the East Saginaw and Bay City Railroad,
through swamp lands, an unthinkable task at the time but made a reality by A.S. Munger who had a
channel dredged through the swamps using the clay soil to create an embankment for the rail system."
As I mentioned, he was appointed US Minister to the Hague by my cousin President Grant in 1876 and
served in that post until 1881.
Gee whiz, Batman. . .lawyer, judge, publisher, established the county, railroad builder, lived around
Indians. If only he lived in New Rochelle I might find him interesting.
But he would be nice, with just two tiny little details filled in, namely:
1. Proving that he had a son (or brother) who married Mary D. Deuel
2. Proving Mary D. Deuel's connection to Henry
I also keep thinking about Milan Henry. He is living in 1840 pretty close to the north end of Wilbur Flats
Road, very close to Jonathan (whose farm extended into Milan, according to Hyatt) and to the family
cemetery where Jonathan is (or was, I gather Newton Deuel moved his gravestone after Poucher
inventoried them in 1924) buried. Milan Henry is born in 1816 at the latest, so if he connected to
Jonathan he must be a son of either Jonathan himself or Samuel, the other sons of Jonathan are too
young to be his father.
I'll end with my (completly unsubstantiated) theory, inspired by the well-reasoned thesis of Professors
Jagger and Richards in their sociological classic, "Brown Sugar." Milan Henry is the illegitimate son of
one of the slave women who are living with Jonathan in the early 1800s, with the biological father being
some white guy from the village. Jonathan raises Milan Henry along with his own children, and he is
adopted by Jonathan and Rachel, although perhaps not formally, and is considered one of the family
and uses their surname. Milan Henry marries and has a daughter Mary (Deuel) Birney in 1843 (I have
to push Hyatt aside on this point, without real grounds to do so) and that lady is your grandfather's
aunt.
Richard Gifford
September 12, 2003