Guns, Nuns & Phantoms

Earl Fowler

Erected in 1879, the big rock monument stands alongside Longley Road, formerly known as Old Pepperell Road, just outside Groton, Massachusetts, a town of about 11,400 within the Greater Boston metropolitan area. This is what it loudly proclaims in inscribed capital letters:

HERE DWELT WILLIAM AND DELIVERANCE LONGLEY WITH THEIR EIGHT CHILDREN. ON THE 27TH OF JULY 1694 THE INDIANS KILLED THE FATHER AND MOTHER AND FIVE OF THE CHILDREN AND CARRIED INTO CAPTIVITY THE OTHER THREE.

William and Deliverance, I was surprised to learn the other day via my subscription to ancestry.ca, were my eighth great-grandparents. One of their three surviving children was my seventh great-grandparent, John Longley. But it was his sister, Lydia, who went on to become a storied character in Canadian history, as would some of their cousins later abducted and adopted into the Mohawk communities at the centre of the 1990 Oka Crisis.

But first, let’s back up a little. This is from the Wikipedia entry for Groton:

The area surrounding modern-day Groton has, for thousands of years, been the territory of various cultures of indigenous peoples. They settled along the rivers, which they used for domestic tasks, fishing and transportation. Historic tribes were the Algonquian-speaking Nipmuc and Nashaway Indians, who established trails connecting the area to Massachusetts Bay.

The European presence in the era began when John Tinker established a trading post with the Nashaway tribe at the confluence of Nod Brook and the Nashua River. The Nashaway called the area Petapawag, meaning “swampy land.” Over the years, more European settlers moved to the area, as it was productive for fishing and farming.

In 1655, the town of Groton was officially settled and incorporated by a group of selectmen including Deane Winthrop. The town was named for Groton in Suffolk, England, the hometown of Deane’s father, the Massachusetts governor John Winthrop. …

During King Philip’s War, when Native Americans tried to destroy the inhabitants, on March 13, 1676, Native Americans raided and burned all buildings except for four Groton garrisons. Among those killed was John Nutting, a Groton Selectman. Survivors fled to Concord and other safe havens. Two years later, many returned to rebuild. The rebuilt town was heavily militarized, and recorded a garrison of 91 men in 1692.

In 1694, Abenaki warriors attacked the town again during the Raid on Groton (during King William’s War). Lydia Longley and two of her siblings were taken captive; the rest of their family was killed. Lydia was taken to Montreal where she was ransomed, converted to Catholicism, and joined the Congregation of Notre Dame, a non-cloistered order.

So first, a bit of context. Selectmen were eminent Puritans. King Philip’s War, aka the First Indian War, was an armed conflict in 1675–1678 between a group of indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands against the New England Colonies and their indigenous allies.

King William’s War, aka the Second Indian War, was in essence the North American theatre of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), the European great power conflict between France and the “Grand Alliance” (a coalition among England, the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg Monarchy set up to oppose the expansionist policies of Sun King Louis XIV). It was the first of six colonial wars fought between New France and New England, along with their respective Native allies, that ended with France ceding its remaining mainland territories in North America east of the Mississippi River in 1763.

Bonjour hi Québec.

Allied to French colonists in the New World, the Abenaki (part of the Wabanaki Confederacy) were and remain an Algonquian-speaking indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands of what is now Canada and the U.S. Quite apart from their alliance with the French, they were trying to defend their traditional territories and discourage further settlement.

And now we narrow the focus back to some family history.

The William Longley slain with most of his family in the 1694 raid was born in 1640 in Groton, so he was 53 or 54 at the time of his death. He succeeded his father, also named William Longley, as the town clerk. The senior William — my ninth great-grandfather — was a Puritan born in Firsby, Lincolnshire, England around 1615. He is thought to have been about 65 when he died in Groton in 1680.

It seems likely that William Sr. arrived in the area in the 1630s, when about 20,000 English Puritans migrated to New England to set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which I was very sorry to learn was the first slave-holding colony in New England. Praise the Lord and pass the iron shackles.

In 1638, William Sr. shows up in the records as having bought a house and land in Lynn, Massachusetts. He, his wife (née Joanna Goffe, though there's some doubt about her maiden name; how’s that for an antiquated term?) and six children moved to Groton in 1663, among the town’s earliest settlers.

William Jr., who quickly married Deliverance after the death of his first wife, owned a farmstead built on 25 acres in the remote northern part of the Groton townsite. The children helped maintain the livestock and the fields. They were taught reading and writing at home, and the boys also received some formal education.

We interrupt this pastoral bliss with a choice morsel from the website freepages.rootsweb.com:

In 1676, the small town of Groton, Massachusetts, located 40 miles from the Boston fort, was almost completely destroyed during an Indian attack. Of the 40 houses burned in the assault, only 14 or 15 were left standing. Thankfully, only 3 people were killed and 2 taken prisoner. In 1678, people began rebuilding Groton and their lives.

(Quick insertion by me: Successfully fleeing this attack, the Longleys sheltered a couple of years in Charlestown, a district of Boston, before returning to Groton.) 

On Friday, July 27, 1694, Groton was attacked again by the Abenaqui (stet) Indians. Their chief, Taxous, selected 40 of his best warriors and attacked Groton at daybreak. 21 people were killed, 13 captured, and 13 badly wounded. Survivors were so frightened, they left the town and sought refuge in surrounding areas.

The victims lived near the Baptist Church, or meeting-house. One of the Baptist minister’s sons was killed, another captured. William (Jr.) and Deliverance Longley were killed along with 5 of their children. The remaining three, Lydia, age 20, John, age 10 or 11, and Betty age 3 or under, were taken into captivity.

Betty died shortly from exposure and hunger in the Abenaqui Indian territory in Canada. Lydia was sold to France, and placed with the Sisters of the Congregations of Notre Dame in Montreal, Canada. …

John remained with the Abenaqui for 4 years. According to his deposition given in 1736, he spent the last 2½ years of his captivity as a servant to Chief Madocawando of the Penobscot tribe. When he was ransomed from captivity, accounts record it was very much against his will.

John Longley returned home around the time his grandmother died, in 1698. (An interesting fact is that in her later years, his grandmother, Joanna Goffe Longley, married his mother’s father, William Crispe.) His grandmother had remembered the captive children in her will.

“I give and bequeath unto my three Grand-Children in captivity if they returne these books — one a Bible another a Sermon booke treating of faith and the other a psalme book.” Like his father, William Longley, and his grandfather, William Longley, Sr., he (John) was the Groton town clerk for many years. He married twice and fathered 12 children. He died in Groton in 1750.

When I looked up the Longley story on the cheery website findagrave.com, I read that one of the daughters reported to have been killed during the raid had in fact survived: “It is said that daughter Jemima was actually scalped and left for dead during the attack, but survived and later married and had children.”

And according to a tract published in 1916 titled Descendants of William Longley of Lynn, Mass., in 1635, which was “complied from family records and revised by Alice Longley,” John Longley was in fact 14 when taken hostage, so older than 10 or 11.

As in most family lore dating back centuries, the facts are subject to a bit of wiggle room.

But from the trustworthy DNA evidence on ancestry.ca, it’s clear John Longley named one of his daughters Lydia, after his sister, and this second Lydia is my sixth great-grandmother. She married a Major Amos Farnsworth, my sixth great-grandfather, who wound up drowning along with their son Benjamin in 1775 when their boat overturned in the Nashua River.

Lydia’s son Lt. Amos Farnsworth kept a fascinating diary, available online, about his role that year in the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he was nicked in the back and shot in the arm by British troops during the Siege of Boston in the first stage of the American Revolutionary War.

Drama aplenty. But it’s the younger Lydia’s kidnapped Aunt Lydia — the one who wound up in Montreal — who gets top billing in this story. After all, she rated a 1958 children’s biographical novel about her life by the feisty Helen A. McCarthy Sawyer titled The First American Nun. (Sawyer was 109, described in her obit as Groton’s “oldest and most storied citizen,” when she died in 2019.)

The elder Lydia also has her own Wikipedia entry, based on multiple historical records and accounts, where we’ll pick up her story at the point where sister Betty has died and she and John have been agonizingly separated. Keep in mind that Lydia was then 20 or 21, depending on which source you believe:

Lydia was soon bartered by her captors as they fled north along the Merrimack River: she was sold to the Pennacook Indians, whose settlement was located in what is today Concord, New Hampshire, probably in exchange for food. Later that year, the Pennacook took her with them to their winter village near Ville-Marie (Montreal). Longley was ransomed by Jacques Le Ber, a wealthy Frenchman who paid to free European captives.

Quick historical sidebar: Le Ber, a merchant and prominent seigneur, was ennobled by Louis XIV in 1686 and took the title of Jacques Le Ber de Saint-Paul de Senneville, based on his hometown back in Normandy. The village of Senneville on the far western end of the Island of Montreal, where I used to revel in riding my old mountain bike late at night through fields of sparkling fireflies, is named for him.

But back to Wikipedia on Lydia:

In Montreal, Longley was influenced by the people she encountered. These likely included Jeanne Le Ber, a daughter of Jacques, who was a noted recluse and would a short time later enter the Congrégation de Notre Dame as a nun. Longley likely met Marguerite Bourgeoys, founder of the convent, who established it as a non-cloistered institution.

Less than two years after being taken from her life in Puritan New England, Longley was instructed in Catholicism and baptized, and named Lydia-Madeleine on 24 April 1696. She also entered this convent, where she taught and ministered to the poor. Although she may have had the opportunity to return to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, she never appeared inclined to do so.

Longley lived in the Notre Dame community for 62 years, mainly in Montreal. Later she lived in Sainte-Famille, Ile d’Orléans, near the city of Québec, where she was appointed as the superior of the mission.

Late in life she wrote to her brother John Longley, who by then had been ransomed from the Abenaki and returned to Groton, against his wishes. She encouraged him to abjure his “heretical” Puritan faith and join her in following Roman Catholic ways.

Britta Gundersen, editor of the Victoria (B.C.) Historical Society’s quarterly, provided some useful context in a piece that ran in the Montreal Gazette this July stemming from research she was doing into her husband’s roots in Quebec’s Eastern Townships:

Historian Emma Lewis Coleman accounted for more than 1,600 colonial Americans who were captured and taken to Canada. Most returned home but approximately 200 stayed in Quebec permanently. Around 50 captives were fully incorporated into Indigenous communities. At least seven young women became members of Catholic religious orders; Longley was the first known to have taken permanent vows.

By March 1696, Longley was at the CND (Congrégation de Notre Dame) in Montreal (Ville-Marie). Accounts of how she got there, where she stayed and what — or who — influenced her religious conversion are all speculative. But it is fact that she was baptized as a Catholic in April 1696. She signed the register Lydia Magdalen Longley. In December she joined the congregation. By September 1699 Longley was a professed nun, Sister Ste-Madeleine, named after the patron saint of women, converts and penitent sinners.

CND nuns went freely about Montreal and to missions throughout Quebec. They taught their students, tended farms and transacted congregation business. Longley was not cloistered; she learned to live and work in a new language and culture. Longley died in Montreal in 1758 at age 84. She was interred at the parish church, site of today’s Notre-Dame Basilica. She spent most of her life in New France. Nonetheless, the burial record referred to her as an “English Woman” — not French, not Canadian.

It’s also a fact that Lydia’s brother John, whatever his initial reluctance to return to a buttoned-down Puritan way of life after being incorporated into an indigenous community, never converted to Catholicism.

But wouldn’t Lydia be surprised — and perhaps bemused — to find her life memorialized not only in Wikipedia and The First American Nun, but also fictionalized in a short story by American writer Callum Angus? The story “Winter of Men,” in Angus’s 2021 book A Natural History of Transition, imaginatively chronicles the lives of Lydia and Jeanne Le Ber in the Congrégation de Notre Dame, threading in some magical realism and gender fluidity themes. I need not say more.

And wouldn’t my dad have been surprised to have known about the family connection during a spin we took around Ile d’Orléans while he was visiting my family in Montreal about 30 years ago? And that Lydia is interred at the site of Notre-Dame Basilica, a couple of blocks from the old Montreal Star/Gazette building where I worked for more than a decade?

Perhaps even more surprising, though, is this throwaway bit from Wikipedia’s Lydia entry: Her cousin Sarah Tarbell, taken in a 1704 raid in Groton, was also ransomed in Montreal, studied and baptized as Catholic, and took the name Marguerite before joining the Congregation.

Tarbell is a well-known name in Montreal- and Cornwall-area Mohawk circles. And here’s why, again sourcing Wikipedia (whether the raid took place in 1704 or 1707 is unclear, I guess, but immaterial here):

In June 1707, Abenaki warriors abducted three children of the large family of Thomas Tarbell and his wife Elizabeth (Wood), cousins to the Longleys who were abducted in 1694. The raiders took them overland and by water to the Mohawk mission village of Kahnawake (also spelled Caughnawaga) south of Montreal.

The two Tarbell boys, John and Zachariah, were adopted by Mohawk families and became fully assimilated. They later each married chiefs’ daughters, had families, and became respected chiefs themselves.

They were among the founders in the 1750s of Akwesasne, after moving up the St. Lawrence River from Kahnawake to escape the ill effects of traders. The brothers’ older sister Sarah Tarbell was ransomed by a French family, and converted to Catholicism. …

In the late nineteenth century, a plaque was installed about the Tarbell children at the site of the family’s former farm in Groton. Descendants with the Tarbell surname are among the Mohawk living at Kahnawake and Akwesasne in the 21st century. Akwesasne is the large Mohawk territory that straddles the Canada-U.S. boundary and the Ontario-Quebec border on both sides of the St. Lawrence River.

My wife, kids and I moved to Montreal a year before the 1990 Oka Crisis blew up into a violent conflict between Mohawk warriors and the Canadian Armed Forces, west of the Island of Montreal.

The 78-day standoff near the Mohawk settlement of Kanesatake that flared over the Town of Oka’s plans to build a golf course on “The Pines,” land including an indigenous burial ground, was an ugly blot on Canadian history. Two people needlessly lost their lives, boundless ill will was stirred up when the Mercier Bridge to LaSalle was closed in Kahnawake to South Shore commuters ... and there’s plenty online about it if you want to refresh your memory. For my part, as I was watching army helicopters fly over our townhouse in Dorval at the time, I had not the slightest inkling of a distant family connection to the proceedings.

And that’s the really sad thing about family histories. If you’ve seen a few episodes of Finding Your Roots, the American documentary TV series on PBS hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in which celebrities have their ancestral histories researched by professional genealogists, you will have noticed a common theme.

Family history rarely seems to last more than a couple of generations. What your grandparents didn’t accurately convey to your parents doesn’t get passed down to you or your kids, and so most of us are pretty much clueless and/or misinformed about significant events in the lives of our progenitors.

Genealogy companies like Utah-based ancestry.com and its country-specific versions are invaluable in helping many of us learn gobsmacking things about where we come from, though of course they nickel-and-dime us for hints and subscribers run the risk of losing sensitive personal information to hackers. The company 23AndMe was the victim of a troubling data breach in 2023 — or rather, its customers were.

But brother, are there ever family secrets galore to be discovered out there! One of my cousins found out that my mom’s brother was not her biological dad. A friend who lent a sperm bank a hand, a-henh, with what was supposed to be an anonymous donation back in the seventies was easily tracked down a couple of years ago by a curious biological daughter via DNA matches.

Through further spelunking into the muds of genetic analysis, the good people (or more likely, the vaunted algorithms) at ancestry.ca have revealed that one of my 13th great-grandfathers was Charles the Bold, the last duke of Burgundy from the French House of Valois-Burgundy, who vied for influence with King Louis XI of France in the 1400s. One of his wives was Margaret of York, Charles’s fourth-degree cousin and the sister of English King Edward IV.

I swear, I am not making this up. How my ancestors branched out from the plummy crown of a glorious giant sequoia to a spindly Canadian Prairie caragana twig during the Great Depression is a story for another time.

But you can bet your bottom nucleotide that there are similar phantoms — with breathtaking histories of their own that you know nothing about — staring back into your eyes from the bevelled mirror when you brush your teeth before bed, their dark boats tethered to the banks of the river of forgetfulness and the waters of oblivion.