the genealogy book

, citing another thread of Adams, that may or may not be connected,

When Calgary poet Adrienne Adams came through Ottawa for the sake of a reading in September 2023, I asked where her particular lineage of Adams originated. She wasn’t sure, but she thought her line went back to Quebec? She eventually mentioned an ancestor named Francis Adams, who their research suggests came from New England to Quebec. The only Francis I could find listed in my Adams genealogical volume, A Family Record of Dr. Samuel Adams, United Empire Loyalist of Vermont and Upper Canada, was “born at Sutton. He married Abigail Taft on 11 Apr 1780.” Comparable to the scant details Adrienne provided, there are no dates or any further information on Francis in the Adams volume, although it does list him as the son of James Adams and Elizabeth Dane of Ipswich, Massachusetts (there are no dates for them either, save their marriage on April 6, 1742). The second volume of Ellery Bicknell Crane’s Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Worcester County, Massachusetts: With a History of Worcester Society of Antiquity (1907), at least, offers this:

James Adams, in about 1735, moved to Northbridge a year before his brother John. The story of the difficulties and hardships of the first settler has been handed down in the family. James Adams built a small hut and lived alone while clearing the land. He slept in the loft and had a spring board arranged so that it would snap against another and make a noise like a gun to scare away prowling wolves and bears at night. He used to draw up the ladder after him as additional protection against the Indians and animals. He used to make weekly trips to George Hill in Grafton for provisions going on Saturday night returning Monday morning. His brother John however soon joined him and they built a log house and commenced a farm on a tract of land which their father purchased September 21, 1732 of Seth Aldrich of Uxbridge and David Batcheller of Sutton. John and James Adams resided and carried on the farm jointly until the death of their father in 1747, when they divided the land agreeably to his request into two equal parts of eighty acres each. James took the part later owned by Plummer Adams and John the Christopher Adams place.