Copyright May 1998, Esther Doyle Read

Updated 30 June 2004

READ FAMILY CONNECTIONS

Almost everyone I have talked to over the years has a story about why they started their family research. And, so it is with me. My story starts with a hurricane. In 1972, Hurricane Agnes hit the northeastern United States with a fury. In Wilkes-Barre (Luzerne County), Pennsylvania, the Susquehanna River overflowed its banks and covered much of the city and Wyoming Valley. My grandfather, Leroy Post Read (1899-1989), left his apartment, which was one mile from the river. He assumed that the water would never reach his home. Several days later he returned to his home and discovered that he had received 18 inches of water–this in a second floor apartment! The damage from Agnes forced Grandpa to move out of the apartment. While he was looking for a new apartment, he moved in with his 84 year old aunt, Ethel Read Mitten Evans. During his stay he mentioned to Ethel that I was interested in history and had been working on the family tree for a school project.

The following summer, when my family made the annual trek from Pittsburgh to Wilkes-Barre, Aunt Ethel asked grandpa to bring me to her house in Ashley, Pennsylvania. Ethel and I became good friends, I was 15, she was 85. After the visit, we corresponded with one another until her death in 1975. I saved every one of her letters. She began to tell me the family history during our visit and continued the story in the letters. She also gave me her family photographs. Over the years I have checked her stories against historical documents and it all checked out. All except one story, which I leave with you. According to Aunt Ethel the Read's came from Ireland ("one step ahead of the sheriff" she said with a twinkle in her eye). Once on this continent the brothers split up: one settled in New England, one in New Jersey and another in the deep south. Since I haven't been able to get further back than the birth of Joseph Read in 1733, this story is still a legend. However, it's a nice family legend. And legends are the stuff that make people ask questions.

Aunt Ethel died in 1975, shortly after my family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. During the years I was in high school in Baltimore, I crammed as many history and anthropology classes into my schedule as I could. In 1976, I left Baltimore for Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC). I graduated from SIUC in 1980 with a BA in Anthropology and began a career in archaeology. In 1990, I completed my graduate course work at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) and received a Masters of Applied Anthopology. I am currently the Director of the Baltimore Center for Urban Archaeology in Baltimore City. I also serve as visiting faculty at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). In past years I have taught archaeology courses at Anne Arundel Community College, in Arnold, Maryland and the University of Baltimore in the city.

My professional training is the reason that this web site is structured very differently than most other geneaological web sites. When I first started "surfing the web" and looking at the various geneaological sites available I was disturbed by the way many authors present their data. Very few sites go beyond a simple recitation of names and dates. They do not provide context. In my professional life, when I am writing an archaeology report, I try to place the artifacts I have recovered from a site in their historic context. That is, I try to tie the artifacts to the people who lived or worked at the site and to historical events that occurred while the site was occupied. If I fail to do this, the artifacts are simply pretty things that have no meaning—they do not help us to understand the past. Because context is so important to an understanding of history, I decided to take the information I gathered about the Read family and place it into its historic context. I will discuss how I did this in the next section.

The final section of each family page is entitled "References". Here are listed all the source materials I consulted to put together the "Notes" section. The references are cited in the text using a format known as "in-line citation". This format is described in the following paragraphs.

Earlier, in the "Web Site Structure" section, I mentioned two types of source material—primary and secondary. Primary sources are documents people wrote about themselves, such as diaries, letters, memoirs or autobiographies. Primary sources also include contemporary documents written about an individual and their financial, legal and other types of transactions. These documents include probate records such as wills, letters of administration, orphans court minutes and inventories. They also include land records, such as deeds, leases, mortgages, surveys and patents. Other primary documents include church records, tax records, historic maps and period photographs, census records, court records and cemetery records and tombstones. Secondary sources are sources written about an individual or group of individuals, or about an area, which use primary source material. These documents include histories (state, local, national and global), journal articles, geneaologies, abstracts of primary documents, and web sites. The "Reference" section of this web site presents the primary and secondary documents in separate groups.

Occasionally you will see a reference which is listed as a "personal communication". For example:

This type of reference is data which was sent to me by another reseacher, usually via e-mail or snail mail. The data comes from their personal research and generally does not include a citation concerning where they got their data. I have used personal communications from a limited number of people, mainly cousins, who I have been working with for some time and whose critical judgement and interpretive skills I trust. Whenever possible I have cross-checked their data against other available sources. This has not always been possible and you will see a few instances where a personal communication is my only source for that particular piece of information.

I also include a few references to web sites. A few of these web sites include transcripts of primary documents. This is especially true of Nancy Pascal's excellent web site which contains a wealth of primary data. Other web sites are, like mine, genealogical web sites. However, most of these do not include references to the source material used by the researcher. In some cases I have been unable to verify the data in a web site by cross-checks to other sources. As my reseach progresses I hope to be able to rely less on undocumented web pages and more on primary sources.

Many of the primary documents I used in this web page are located in the Office of the Surrogate Judge in both Warren and Sussex County, New Jersey. Other documents are located at the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, New Jersey and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Most of the secondary sources are located at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, Maryland. Some are located at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland and various branches of the Anne Arundel County, Maryland Public Library system. A few of the secondary sources (mainly general histories of the United States, social histories, material culture studies, and archaeological materials) are from my own private library.

If you would like to send me corrections or additions to the data, please include your source material. If your source material is not included with your data, I will add the data later when I have had a chance to check your material against other sources. As I am doing this in my spare time it could be awhile before you see your information added to these pages. For primary sources, please include the record location (such as the County office or court; the archive collection; the library), the liber (or book) the data is found in, the folio (or page number) and type of liber (such as "Wills" or "Letters of Administration" or "Land Records"). For secondary resources please include the author's full name, the complete title, the date of publication (the copyright), publisher, and location of publisher. The page number(s) would also be appreciated. Check the reference sections of this web page for an idea on how to gather information for references.

In the abstract of the will of Sarah Sutton Read, Joseph Read's wife, we encounter Reeds, Suttons, and Suttens:

Isaac and James Reed were the sons of Joseph and Sarah Read. Jonathan Sutten and Nathan Sutton were Sarah's brothers. Hutchinson used the spellings that appeared in the actual documents. Yet all of these individuals were related and several different spellings appear in the primary documents. Even now, in Warren County, New Jersey, there are Read and Reed families that are related.

The area comprising the current Sussex and Warren Counties, New Jersey was settled shortly after 9000 B.C. by groups of Native Americans. Settlement in the area before 9000 B.C. was probably impossible as it was covered by the Wisconsin Glacial sheet of the last ice age. The area was continuously occupied by Native Americans over the next 11,000 years or so. By the late seventeenth century (1600s), Munsee speaking groups, known as the Minisink Indians, occupied the area from the Delaware Water Gap north to the headwaters of the Delaware River. The Minisink would eventually be grouped with other culturally and linguistically similar groups as the Delaware Indians. By the time the Dutch arrived in the area, the Minisink were under the military dominance of the Iroquois Confederation which was centered in what is now New York state (Goddard 1978:213-215).

The Dutch entered the area in the 1650s, traveling down the Delaware River from the area of Esopus (Kingston), New York. Local legend holds that their primary interest in the area was the deposits of copper found in what is now Pahaquarry Township, Warren County. The legend states that they set up mining operations in the area, hauling the ore north to Eposus (Minchin 1998). However, as the historian F. J. Stephens points out (Stutz 1992:250-252), the Dutch lacked the technology to effectively extract ore from the mountains in the seventeenth century. In addition, to haul the ore to Esposus they would have crossed one hundred miles of territory inhabited by Native Americans. Relations between the Dutch and local Native Americans in the late seventeenth-century were strained, to say the least. It is probable that the Dutch were more interested in settling in the area than in mining.

English, Irish and Scottish settlers began to arrive in the area in the early 1700s. They settled on the slopes of the "Blue Mountains," which are today known as the Kittaninny Mountains. By the 1740s German settlers were traveling up the Delaware River from Philadelphia and settling along Paulins Kill. By 1750, the European population in the Sussex/Warren area was about 600 (Sives 1997). The Delaware Indians were still in the area at this time, although they had begun to move west across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania (Goddard 1978:221). In the 1720s the American frontier began about 30 miles north of Philadelphia and included the Sussex/Warren area.

In 1737, an event occurred across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania which would have repercussions for both the Delaware Indians and the European settlers in the Sussex/Warren area. William Penn of Pennsylvania, unlike most other colonial leaders, believed that the native populations should be treated with fairness. It should be noted that Penn's ideas of fairness were colored by his background as the son of a wealthy and privileged English Admiral, as well as by his conversion to the Society of Friends (Quakers). Penn's version of fairness was therefore based on English ideas concerning the transfer of property, as well as the teachings of the Quakers. While Penn's worldview was not always in sinq with the local Indians, they held him in high regard because of his personal interity. When Penn died in 1718, his sons, Thomas, Richard and John Penn inherited the colony of Pennsylvania (Morgan 1993:277-288). When it came to dealing with the Indians, Penn's sons were not cut from the same cloth as their father.

By 1732 the Penn brothers were deeply in debt. In order to raise money the brothers decided to have a land lottery in Pennsylvania. They would sell tickets for 40 shillings each, then 1000 acres of land would be distributed to the winners. Unfortunately for the Penns, some of the land slated for the prize was occupied by the Delaware. The Penns went through their father's papers and found a deed from three Delaware chiefs to William Penn, dated 28 August 1686. According to the historian Morgan:

This "walking deed" had never been walked. In May 1735, Thomas Penn met with the Delaware to discuss the deed. While Penn was meeting with the Delaware, he had a team secretly blazing the trail along which the "walker" would pass. This way no time would be lost searching for the best route through the forest. A second meeting took place in August 1737 where a copy of the 1686 deed was produced, as well as a bogus map of the area in question. The Delaware chiefs agreed that the sale was genuine and agreed that the boundary should be walked. They insisted that Delaware observers must accompany the walkers. The walk began on 19 September 1737 on John Chapman's farm near's Wrightstown, Pennsylvania. The walkers hired by Thomas Penn were Edward Marshall and James Yeates. Penn agreed to pay each walker 5 pounds. In addition, he offered the man who walked the farthest a bonus prize of 500 acres. Between 6 AM and 1:15 PM, Marshall and Yeates covered 28 miles. By 6:15 PM they covered another 12 miles. The Indians realized that they had been duped. They complained that the whites were practically running, that the proper course was not being followed. The following day the walk started late as the Indians and the horses had disappeared. Marshall and Yeates started off at 8 AM. By 1:30 that afternoon, Yeates collasped, unable to go further. Marshall continued until 2PM, stopping four miles north of the current town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Marshall had covered a total of 60 miles in a day and a half. (Morgan 1993:288-293)

After the walk ended, surveyors ran the last line of the tract from Jim Thorpe back to the Delaware River, near the current town of Port Jarvis, New York. And so the Delaware were swindled out of a large quantity of land by the Penns. Not only were the Delaware cheated, Penn never gave Marshall the 500 bonus acres promised to the man who walked the farthest. The anger of the Delaware simmered for almost 20 years. The French and Indian War (known in Europe as the Seven Years War) began in 1754. The Delaware finally got their chance for revenge. The French backed many of the local Native American tribes, using them as pawns in their war againist the British. The Delaware sided with the French. Between 1755 and 1757 they attacked white settlements up and down the Delaware River. The Sussex/Warren area was included in their area of raids. The area of the "Walking Purchase" was hardest hit. In Northampton County, Pennsylvania alone, 115 settlers were killed over a two year period. The wife of Edward Marshall, the man partially responsible for the land swindle, was killed during a Delaware raid on his farm along the Delaware River (Morgan 1993:295; Stutz 1992:248-249).

By 1758, the British had subdued the Delaware. In two conferences held in Crosswick and Easton, the Delaware were forced to cede all of their lands in New Jersey to the British. With the signing of the treaty, the Delware began their long withdrawal to the west. They initially settled on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, remaining there until the end of the French and Indian War. By 1765, most of the Munsee speaking Delaware had moved to the Allegheny River basin of western Pennsylvania. Continued pressure by white settlers forced the Delaware to remove to Ohio. By the end of the Revolutionary War there were few Delaware living east of the northeastern corner of Ohio. The Treaty of Greenville, signed in 1795, forced the Delaware still further west to the upper forks of the White River in Indiana. Subsequent treaties in 1818, 1829 and 1839 pushed the Delaware from Indiana. Some of the Munsee speakers moved north into Wisconsin and Canada, where their descendants live today. Other Delawares moved into southern Missouri and finally into Kansas. In 1846, Francis Parkman reported that the Delaware "Living around Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on the Oregon Trail, were considered 'the most adventurous and dreaded warriors upon the prairies'" (Stutz 1992:250). By 1854, some of the Delaware were on reservations on the Brazos River in Texas. After the Civil War, Delaware groups living in Kansas "exchanged" their land for land in the Cherokee Nation located in Northeast Oklahoma (Goddard 1978:220-224).

The net result of the 1758 treaties was to push the frontier west into Pennsylvania. Sussex County was set off from Morris County, New Jersey on 8 June 1753, the year before the French and Indian War began. The county seat was established at Newton. The county, as originally consistuted, included what is now Warren County. Settlement in the county probably slowed during the war and the period of Delaware raids. After the 1758 treaties, the Sussex/Warren area was no longer under threat of Native American uprising. Settlers began to pour into the area. Our family was among the whites who benefited from the tragic loss of the Delaware people. In 1758, the year of the Easton Treaty, James Sutton settled in Sussex County. James Sutton (1709-1791) was the father of Sarah Sutton Read. He purchased a farm near Hackettstown in Independence Township. He later bought an additional farm in Mansfield Township (Chase n.d.:51). The population of Sussex County increased over the next 71 years. On 20 November 1824, Warren County was set off from Sussex County. The new county seat was established at Belvidere (Minchin 1998; Sives 1997).

I urge you to begin to learn more about the variety and richness of native cultures which flourish in the United States today. The more you learn, the better able you are to join in the effort to provide decent living conditions and job opportunities for Native peoples.

For more information visit, write or call:

Delaware Tribal Headquarters
220 N.W. Virginia
Bartlesville, OK 74003

(918)336-5672

Or, e-mail other questions to lenape@Cowboy.net

REFERENCES CITED