the genealogy book

, on Samuel Henry Rose UEL (1745-1789)

Samuel Henry Rose (1745-1789), United Empire Loyalist. He was born in Armenia, Dutchess County, New York, and died in Saint-Jean, Province of Quebec. There’s a lot of activity between those two dates, those two geographies, some of which can be sourced through archives. The whole of the American Revolution, for example. According to a document held by the Manchester Historical Society, Manchester, Vermont: “In the area which was then known as the New Hampshire Grants, but is now in Vermont, Samuel Rose, formerly of Amenia (Nine Partners) New York, built the first log house in 1764, in the southwestern corner of the Township of Bennington. In 1796, Rose also built the first framed house of the settlement.” It goes on to write that:

This was a very turbulent period as, at the time, this area was claimed by the two Royal Provinces – New Hampshire and New York. The Governor of New York declared all New Hampshire grants null and void and began re-granting the land of a reign of influential land-grabbers which included some of the officials of the province. New Hampshire declined to defend the titles it had granted. In 1767, the Bennington settlers sent an envoy to London. The King ordered a stay of proceedings until he could determine the rights of the matter. New York ignored the decree. The first rumblings of the storm to come were heard in October of 1769, when officers from Albany attempted to survey new lines near Bennington. There followed various events – such as confiscation of lands – leading to the formation of the ‘Green Mountains Boys’ and the events leading to the American Revolution. A notable confiscation was that of the Rose family in the southwestern part of town. Samuel Rose had led the original group of settlers. Some of his sons turned Loyalist. According to local legend. Samuel Rose Jr. had organized the Tory party just before the Bennington Campaign (this was in August 1777). This estate was confiscated in September 1777. Rose Jr. left Bennington in 1778.

Turned, as the Americans would phrase it. Having shifted perspective. There is the right way, I suppose, and then there is the wrong way, although from their perspective to mine, we might disagree on which exactly is which. Samuel was captured and jailed en route north from the American colonies in April 1777, but managed to escape to the British lines. He landed at a refugee camp at Sorel, now Sorel-Tracy, the geographic end-point of Lake Champlain, a site north-east of Montreal, where he served as an Army storekeeper. His wife and small children later joined him, as a few more children would join them within a few years. By 1786, along with Dr. Samuel Adams, my sixth great grandfather, and Simpson Jenne, he petitioned the government for land but was refused, and the family remained in Sorel. His daughter Sarah would grow up to marry Dr. Adams’ son Ezra: a line from which I emerge.

By the 1790s, some of Rose’s sons had settled further west into Upper Canada, landing in Lanark and Grenville Counties, seeding Roseville, Rosedale and Rose’s Creek. His son Ezekial, for example, who founded Rose’s Settlement by 1827, just north of Killarnock, between Smith’s Falls and Merrickville. A name, by any other, which evolved into an eventual Rosedale. As Samuel Jr. settled in Wolford in January 1800, where he and his wife Charlotte would have twelve children. Wolford, what is now Merrickville. A quaint Ontario village.

Word has that Samuel Sr. died from drowning, but accounts contradict.

The name Rose, evolved from Roosa, which research suggests a name derived from the High German word “rose” meaning “a rose.” Can a word mean itself? One might rework threads of Gertrude Stein, her “rose is a rose is a rose,” a further sequence of begat and begun. Other lineages have the surname from English and Scottish in origin, from a patronymic root, bestowed to the offspring of a Roe, Rowe, Ross or Rose, which itself was the medieval diminutive of Roland. Alternately, Rose emerged as a Norman form of the German name Hrodheid, a name composed of the words Hrod (“fame”) and Heid (“type” or “kind”), originally spelled as the Norman Roese or Rohese. The flower is a much later association.

My middle daughter Rose was born in November 2013, well before I was aware of any of this. It was Christine who suggested the name. In February 2013, the same week we discovered we were expecting was the same week I was handed my birth mother’s name, and therefore, my own birth last name; a Children’s Aid response to my information request. How, through these two separate events, my lineage expanded from both ends.