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, as her brother was the keeper of the family information, 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.
James’ father, another Samuel Adams, as the Adams volume offers, “was a yeoman, and lived on his father’s farm, one half of which his father deeded to him upon his marriage.” The book does list ten children “born at Sutton” to James and Elizabeth, suggesting their Loyalist retreat across the border from Massachusetts. Francis is their third child, with only the sixth, Israel (d. May 11, 1811), ninth, Moses (1760-May 2, 1839) and tenth, James (d. August 4, 1804 in Sutton) offered dates. If this is, indeed, the correct Adams, Francis Adams and Dr. Samuel Adams UEL would have been second cousins, sharing great grandparents Nathaniel Adams (c. 1641-1715) and Mercy Dickinson (1646-1735), both of Massachusetts. Nathaniel was son of the original Adams settler, William. Originating from Ipswich, England, I mean. Nathaniel and his line down to James all born in its Massachusetts namesake.
No, no, Adrienne responds to a draft of this piece, that can’t be the same Francis. Those dates are a hundred years off. She doesn’t actually provide a date, or any further information, so perhaps I might never know.
Naturally, when I first read the listing for Francis citing Sutton, I mistakenly presumed Quebec, but online sources locate him in Sutton, Massachusetts, which further shifts the possibility of any potential connection. It’s impossible to know without further research, but it suggests this a lineage that may not have come north as Loyalists, after all. Either way, I’m fascinated at this absence in my knowledge around the villages of Sutton and Sorel-Tracy, Quebec, what would have, in many ways, existed as refugee camps or towns set up by the British for retreating Colonists still loyal to the Crown. It was here where my particular line of Adams, as well as the Roses (among so many others), landed, before western lots were distributed, whether into Dundas or Lanark Counties or further afield; a gathering of Loyalists awaiting land grants after losing all that they held in New England. Numerous sources even within the Adams genealogy suggest the movement north and west wasn’t a quick one, with years spent in Quebec, attempting to settle before heading out, rebuilding their lives and their families, with only the birth locations of subsequent children displaying their progress. As the website for the Town of Sutton, Quebec, offers:
The boundaries of Sutton township were defined in 1792 by surveyor Jesse Pennoyer, who placed survey markers at the four corners of a 16-km (10-mile) square. He also divided the lands in 308 lots. The official history of Sutton’s colonization begins in 1802 with the concession of most of the lots divided by Jesse Pennoyer (approximately 200 acres each) to some 168 concession holders. In addition, at the time, the church and the king each received 1 in 7 lots. However, many colonists had already settled in those territories some years before. Some of them had fled the U.S. after the American Revolution (1776–1783), as England offered to welcome its loyalists to Canada, at that time one of its colonies. Others had simply migrated north in search of affordable land.
Some of these squatters received concessions in 1802. Among them were Thomas Spencer and Alexander Griggs, who left New York State in 1792 to settle in Abercorn; Joseph Soles from Rhode Island, who settled in North Sutton in 1795; Moses Westover, who came from Massachusetts in 1796 and built a house not far from the intersection of Mont-Écho and Élie; and William Marsh, who, as early as 1797, was living in the heart of what is now the core of Sutton, known for a long time as Sutton Flat.