1630—1780
Massachusetts, New Jersey
This chapter continues with the Puritan background of my mother, Mary Catharine Clingan Nelson. It focuses on her great grandmother Tamar (Munson) Parker who has proven to be somewhat of a mystery in my research. Evidence regarding the ancestry of Tamar, the wife of Amariah Parker, is very thin, and so we can only speculate about her family connections.
All that we can really know about Tamar Munson Parker is that a few sources name her as the wife of Amariah Parker, a former wagon master who served in the Revolutionary war. She may have been just a typical Colonial American wife and mother. However, her supposed maiden name of Munson possibly connects her to some older, more prominent colonial families. These connections led me to study further the history of Puritan families descending from those of John Winthrop’s Great Migration to Massachusetts beginning about 1630 and proceeding through more than 100 years up to the Revolutionary War.
Through the early years of the American Colonies, the Puritan colonists encountered many problems. Surrounding congregations disagreed with their stringent religious and political views. There were also conflicts with the Native Americans and with the Dutch who were attempting to expand their colony, New Netherland. These difficulties forced many of the descendants of the original Massachusetts settlers to move on to Connecticut and then New Jersey. Among them were the Ward, Harrison and Munson families. We think that possibly Tamar was descended from one or more if these wayfaring families including the immigrants George Ward, Richard Harrison, and Captain Thomas Munson. George Ward and his wife were in the very first contingent of Winthrop ships having been close neighbors, if not associates, of Winthrop in England. Richard Harrison’s ancestor in England had been instrumental in the downfall of King Charles. Captain Thomas Munson, who had arrived in Massachusetts with the original Winthrop fleet, participated in the Pequot War and then moved to New Haven where he died. A Munson family genealogist has recorded that his descendant, Solomon Munson, was the only Munson family to move from Connecticut to New Jersey before the Revolution.
As was typical of some puritan congregations, voting privileges were granted only to those individuals who held their pastor’s specific interpretation of salvation and baptism. The Wards were part of a congregation who held to this concept of a congregation and moved several times in order to maintain the integrity of their belief. They had first settled in Massachusetts, but after a few years they moved together as a congregation to Connecticut and in 1667 to established themselves in the town they called New Ark (now named Newark), New Jersey in 1667. The Reverend Abraham Pierson was their spiritual leader. John Warde (sic.), another possible ancestor of Tamar, was especially important in Abraham Pierson’s plan to move the congregation to New Ark. He was a leader in the scouting group to investigate and purchase land from the Indians in New Jersey. Thus far, we do not know if there is a connection between the immigrant Ward families and the very influential puritan scholar and preacher Samuel Ward in east England. We also do not know if there is a connection to Nathaniel Ward, who was the Puritan preacher closest to John Winthrop in the New England colony.
Another Puritan ancestor could be Solomon Munson whose family moved from Connecticut to New Jersey before the Revolutionary War. In New Jersey, the Munson family is recorded in a congregation that had split from the Puritanism of Abraham Pierson’s congregation. In the transcribed records of this congregation there is one mention of Amariah Parker (possibly Tamar’s husband) regarding the death of a child.
We have learned that Mother is descended from several Puritan families who gradually moved from Massachusetts to Connecticut to New Jersey over a period of about 100 years after the first Winthrop fleet in 1630. We have found two families who could be related to Tamar—which was a fairly common feminine name at that time. They happen to represent two different interpretations of Puritanism which was struggling to establish their congregations.
Though we know very little of Mother’s great grandmother Tamar, we can be quite sure that her immigrant ancestors were staunch Puritans developing their own particular version of their faith through the next century until the Great Revolution. The children of Amariah and Tamar Parker included Abraham, Mother’s great grandfather. Eventually Abraham Parker migrated to Ohio and married Martha Wimmer in Preble County, Ohio in 1823. In turn, their descendents migrated to Indiana, and then to Nachusa, Illinois where my mother was born in 1899.
