As I mentioned in another post, my foray into genealogy was prompted by my wife, Laura’s request that I find a Revolutionary War ancestor for her so she could qualify for the Daughters of the American Revolution. As yet, I have not been able to do so. Laura’s mother’s folks come from New Brunswick, Canada, and her father’s people in part come from there and possibly Nova Scotia as well. They are Canadian because they descend from Loyalists who moved there after the American Revolution. So, yes, I found numerous ancestors for Laura who were veterans of the American Revolution, but they didn’t fight on the American side.
It is fun, though, to tell people that Laura descends from John and Abigail Adams, as well as from Sam Adams. And that statement is true. One of Laura’s 8th great-grandfathers was a man named Samuel Adams. He was born in 1645 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and died in 1727 in Canterbury, Connecticut, four and a half decades prior to the start of the American Revolution. That particular Sam Adams had a grandson, John Adams, who was born in Connecticut in 1740, and died in 1818 in New Brunswick, Canada. That John Adams was Laura’s 5th great-grandfather, and was a Loyalist, which is why he moved to New Brunswick.
Samuel Adams’ son, David, who was Laura’s 7th great-grandfather, married Abigail Silliman, which of course made her Abigail Adams.
So Laura, indeed, descends from Samuel Adams, John Adams and Abigail Adams. Just not the Sam, John and Abbey we know from the history books.
But there actually is a family connection between Laura and the famous Sam and John. Their great-great grandfather, Henry Adams, is the great-grandfather of the Sam Adams who is Laura’s 8th great-grandfather. Henry Adams was born in 1583 in Somerset, England. He emigrated from Braintree, Essex in England to what soon became Braintree, Massachusetts in about 1632–1633. Braintree, Massachusetts, is where Presidents John and John Quincy Adams were born.
The home in which John Adams was born is now a national historic park, and we visited there with my Dad a couple of years before he died. Information can be found at https://www.nps.gov/adam/index.htm.