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Ruth W. Cooper Spencer Weeks (1798-1882)

Ruth W. Cooper Spencer Weeks (1798-1882)

Posted: 15 Jun 2015 6:48PM GMT
Classification: Query
Surnames: Weeks, Spencer, Cooper, Sloot, Sloat, Wiltsie, Young, Whitney, Poyer, Van Vlack, Van Vleck, Davidson, Osborn, Lee, Norris, Bruce, Townsend, Palen, Bull, Hare
Ruth W. Cooper Spencer Weeks (1798 Fishkill, Dutchess, NY - 1882 Oswego, Oswego, NY)

Ruth Cooper Spencer Weeks was born in Fishkill, NY in 1798. 1
She came from a complex family. She was the youngest child of each of her parents, whose marriage was the second for both.
Her father was Obediah J. Cooper. 2 Her mother was Mary Slote. 3 Both were born approximately 1755 or slightly earlier in Dutchess County, NY although there are no birth records for them. She was named for her paternal grandmother Ruth Wiltsie Cooper , the second of her grandfather John Cooper's three wives. 4 Her maternal grandmother was Elizabeth Young Schouten Slote Whitney who likewise was married three times. Elias Slote or Sloot, Mary's father, was Elizabeth's second husband. Both Obediah and Mary were of Colonial New York descent; Obediah was half Dutch and half English 5, while Mary's immigrant ancestors came from the Palatinate, Bristol, Amsterdam, and Holstein. 6
Obediah's first wife was Sarah Poyer whose grandfather had been the Rev.Thomas Poyer, the first Episcopal minister of Jamaica, Queens, NY.
They had two sons:
Thomas Poyer Cooper born 1779
and John Cooper born 1781 in Fishkill. 7
Sarah died by 1790.
Mary's first husband was Henry Van Vlack II 8 and they had at least seven children recorded in Dutch Reformed church records between 1772 and 1782 in Hopewell, New Hackensack, and Poughkeepsie. Only three of them are known for certain to have survived to adulthood:
Elizabeth 'Betsey' Van Vlack born 1772
Henry Van Vlack III born 1778
and Cornelia 'Caty' Van Vlack born 1780. 9
Obediah and Mary were married by 1794 and living in Fishkill when they signed an unusually comprehensive family deed involving inherited Cooper land in Albany. The children of this marriage were
Mary 'Polly' Cooper, said to have died young and unmarried. 10
James Cooper born 1796
and Ruth born in 1798.
In the year 1800 three of the children married. Thomas Cooper married Sarah Davidson at the First & Second Presbyterian Church in New York City where he settled. His son and grandsons became the official city weighers for the Port of New York. From this point he no longer figures in the life of his family of origin. Cornelia Van Vlack married Robert C. Osborn in Fishkill. Her marriage record calls her Cornelia ‘Caty’ Van Vlack. Robert and Caty Osborn lived in Poughkeepsie for the rest of their lives where they raised a large family. 11 The third marriage that took place in 1800 was between Henry Van Vlack III and Catherine Palen, also in Fishkill. They had seven children. It was with the Loyalist Palen family that the Van Vlacks and Coopers emigrated to Canada around 1802. 12 Betsey Van Vlack had already married Charles Townsend by 1792 and they continued to live in Dutchess County for the time being raising ten children.
When the family went to Canada, Henry Van Vlack was about 24, John Cooper 21, James Cooper 6 and Ruth 4. Obediah and Mary Cooper were about 47.
The first record of the Coopers in Canada occurs in 1803 when John Cooper was married to Mehitabel Bull by a Dutch Reformed minister in Hallowell, Prince Edward County, Ontario. This nearly got Mehitabel disowned by her Quaker Meeting for “marrying out”, but when her husband converted to the Society of Friends all was forgiven. They had a dozen children and lived in the hamlet of Bloomfield in the Town of Hallowell in Prince Edward County for the rest of their lives.
Initially, the Coopers and Van Vlacks lived in Hallowell. The 1808 assessment roll for Hallowell shows the following:
John Cooper is named first apart from the rest of his family. The report shows that he has no land either cultivated or uncultivated.
Later come the others, however it depends upon which transcript you read as to whether they are listed together or are alternated with the Dugalls.
Obadiah Cooper - 160 acres of land uncultivated, 40 acres cultivated
next is
Henry Van Vlack – no acres uncultivated, 10 acres cultivated
next is
Daniel Hare – 260 acres uncultivated, 40 acres cultivated
The last named person will prove significant.
The years 1811-1812, when Ruth turned 13 and 14, brought change. The last record I have for Obediah and Mary Cooper dates from January 1811 when they deeded their property to their neighbor. I don’t know what became of them after that. It was during these years that Charles and Betsey Van Vlack Townsend emigrated to Hallowell with their family where they lived out the rest of their lives. Also at this time, probably just before hostilities between the U.S. and Canada broke out, came Ruth's future parents-in-law James and Hannah Van Vleck Weeks with their family, also from Fishkill. I cannot place Hannah in the Van Vleck family tree, but her name is known from their 1797 marriage record in Fishkill. 13
The Weekses lived in Cherry Valley, Town of Athol, while Henry Van Vlack III who served on the Canadian side in the War of 1812, moved to Marysburgh on the other side of Prince Edward County.
Where exactly Ruth was during the ensuing years I cannot say, but she was clearly in Prince Edward County when she became pregnant by a Mr. Hare in 1817. 14
Her eldest child, who she named after her father, was born late in 1817 or early in 1818 in Prescott, Grenville, Ontario. Or at least that was what Obediah Cooper Spencer believed. 15
How on earth Ruth ended up in Prescott, I have no idea. She had no family there.
Her first husband, Charles Spencer, was apparently still married to his first wife in the 1820 Census of Spencerville, Edwardsburgh, Grenville, Ontario. 16 Obediah was already two years old by this time.
Charles’ children from his first marriage were Charles Jr., born about 1815, Peleg born 1817, and Edwin born 1818. Obediah obviously does not fit in here chronologically, but he was given the surname Spencer. It’s doubtful he was even aware of it given the circumstances. 17 Charles and Ruth married sometime between 1820-1823. A son was born to them between 1821-1824 in Prescott. I do not know his name. 18
A record for either of Ruth’s two marriages has not been found. Regardless of the regularity or irregularity concerning her marriages, as far as SHE was concerned she had been married twice. 19
We cannot know the true nature of Ruth's relationship with Mr. Hare nor to what degree her connection with him was consensual, but inspite of Ruth’s out of wedlock pregnancy by Mr. Hare, there appears to have been no hard feelings about it in the family; her brother James Cooper was married to his first wife Hannah Hare by 1818. 20 Ruth's future brother-in-law Abram Weeks married Cindarilla Hare in 1820. 21 The Hare sisters were the eldest daughters of the aforementioned neighbor Daniel Hare, formerly of Hallowell. That there was no shot-gun wedding for Mr. Hare and Ruth suggests that there was a particular impediment to it. Perhaps Mr. Hare was too young to be married, or perhaps he already was married, or perhaps Ruth was having none of it and ran away before her pregnancy was discovered and returned only as the mother-of-two widow of Charles Spencer and no one was the wiser. One can only speculate.
Charles Spencer was killed in a logging accident in Prescott in August, 1824. A newspaper notice about it notes that he left behind a wife and 5 children, but does not name any of them. 22 Researchers of the Spencerville Spencers, to whom Charles belonged, can find names for only three of Charles' five children: Charles jr., Peleg, and Edwin. I propose that the two missing children are Obediah Cooper Spencer and his younger Spencer brother. At the time of their father's death, Charles Jr. was 9, Peleg was 7, Edwin and Obediah were 6, and the youngest boy was a toddler or infant. The three orphaned Spencer boys were raised by their paternal grandparents in Spencerville. Ruth took her two sons and went back to Prince Edward County. The half-brothers never saw each other again. And that is why the Spencerville researchers could not find them.
A year and a half after Charles Spencer died, Ruth married again. In the spring of 1826 she married Henry Van Vleck Weeks I of Cherry Valley, who was a year her junior. Soon they left Canada forever and took their family to Oswego City, NY. The party consisted of Ruth, Henry, Obediah, Obediah's little Spencer brother , and Henry's father James. At around the same period Ruth's half-nephew Gilbert Palen Van Vlack also moved to Oswego.
Initially Henry Weeks supported his growing family by working as a carpenter on the docks. He and Ruth had six children together, all born in Oswego:
Hannah M. born 1827
Oliver W. born 1830
Henry V. Jr. born 1832
Cornelia O. 'Kitty' born 1835
John Osborn born 1839
Charles C. born 1841
(Hannah for Henry's mother, Oliver for a grand-uncle of Henry's, Henry jr. for himself, Cornelia and John Osborn for Ruth's half-sister, and Charles for Ruth's first husband.)
It is surprising to see that two children were named in honor of the half-sister Ruth had not lived with since she was two years old. I don't know what kind of connection they maintained with each other, but Caty Osborn had a son named Obediah C. Osborn apparently named for her step-father. (For that matter, all four of Obediah J. Cooper's surviving children had a son named Obediah.)
Obediah C. Spencer married Martha Lee in Oswego in 1841 and joined his in-laws in the ship building profession. When the pier of Oswego burned down in the early 1850s, Obediah moved to Buffalo, NY, and later to Erie, PA where he died in 1887. He named his second son Charles Obediah Spencer apparently for his father and himself. He probably never knew that Charles Spencer was not his birth father.
The younger Spencer boy is accounted for in the 1830 and 1840 Censuses for Oswego in the Weeks household, but after that I have found no further record of him.
Henry Weeks retired from carpentry eventually after the pier burned down because he had become lame and sickly. The family bought a farm on the outskirts of town and tried their hand at farming instead, but that venture failed. They finally sold the farm and bought a house in the city.
All four of the Weeks boys served in the Civil War. They all seemed to have been rather eager to get out of town and move west, too, except for the youngest son Charlie. He was the sole support for his parents at the time of his death in an army hospital in New Orleans in 1863. Witnesses for Ruth's pension application described in sad detail the numerous problems the Weekses faced and noted that before their youngest son Charlie had died, their other sons had moved away and had not supported them. As his survivor, Ruth lived off of Charlie's pension for the rest of her life. Letters Charlie had written to his parents and sister Cornelia (he addressed her as "Kittie") from his army camps were included in his service file.
Oliver and Henry Jr. joined the army from their new home in Indiana. Out west Oliver had married Alice 'Allie' Milenda Norris while Henry Jr. married Mahala Caroline Bruce in 1867 in Illinois after the war. Oliver went only as far as Danville, Illinois where he died in a soldier's home in 1911, but Henry Jr. went all western and got to Dodge City, Kansas before dying early in a sanitorium in Trinidad, Colorado in 1879.
John Osborn Weeks had the oddest life of the lot. He worked briefly as a librarian in Oswego, but that was the last Oswego ever saw of Ruth's sons. In 1864 after having served for New York in the war, he married a woman named Mary E. Pearse who he had met when he was a student at Kenyon College in Ohio. They moved around a bit between Ohio and New York State before going to Chicago in 1877 and it was here that Mary's career as an "occult physician" took off. Then they adopted what was the common remedy in those days for a failed marriage - they just went their separate ways and pretended that they were widowed. For Mary this was no problem. After her second marriage she was known as Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett (14 Oct 1842 Gambier, OH -12 Feb. 1932 Los Angeles, CA) and wrote best sellers (google her!). But for John Weeks' widow trying to claim his Civil War pension it was a bit trickier. In Morgantown, West Virginia in 1882 John Weeks married a local woman named Mary Margaret Snyder. They settled finally in Cleveland, Ohio. When John died there in 1894, Mary Margaret got some help from his sister Cornelia in trying to prove she deserved his pension although Cornelia stopped short of mentioning anything in her deposition about her brother being married. Mary Margaret claimed in her pension case that her husband's first wife had "died around 1874". Most of the testimony was meant to prove that she herself had never been married to anyone but John, so she got her pension.
As for the two Weeks girls, Hannah had died unmarried in 1855 at the age of 27 and Kitty did not marry George Nipper until she was in her forties.
So when Henry Weeks died in 1873 and Ruth died in 1882, Cornelia O. Weeks Nipper was the last of the family left in Oswego. She inherited her mother's house, and when she herself died in 1918, she willed it to her step-daughter.
Ruth outlived at least three, probably four of her eight children. And out of eight children, only three are known to have living descendants today - Obediah C. Spencer, Oliver W. Weeks, and Henry V. Weeks Jr. 23
This is the obituary printed in the Oswego Daily Times following her funeral:
"On Thursday afternoon of this week a few remaining relations and many warm friends of another of the oldest residents of Oswego, were assembled in Riverside cemetery, to attend her burial rites. *
Mrs. Ruth Weeks was born in Fishkill N.Y. 23 April 1798. In early childhood, she removed with her parents to Canada, there endured the hardships and privations incident to pioneer life until the spring of 1826, when she came to this city. Died 26 Sept. 1882. Her life was retiring, her religion expressed in deeds rather than words. She never lost an opportunity to do anyone a kindness. Her husband died in 1873; since then she has been in feeble health, sixteen months confined almost wholly to her bed. Her own words were "I've never said a great deal but my heart trusts the Lord."
Of her eight children, four sons were at one time numbered in our army. One daughter remained with her, the comfort of her last years."
* The cemetery is Oswego Rural Cemetery south of the city. There she is buried next to her husband Henry Weeks, and her father-in-law James Weeks. Nearby this lot her children Cornelia Nipper and Charles Weeks are buried next to each other. I have personally visited the gravesites.

Re: Ruth W. Cooper Spencer Weeks (1798-1882)

Posted: 15 Jun 2015 6:51PM GMT
Classification: Query
Notes and Sources for Ruth W. Cooper Spencer Weeks (1798-1882)

1. Birthdate taken from her obituary and tombstone in Oswego Rural Cemetery, Oswego, NY. Nota bene that this Oswego is the city in Oswego County and not the locality in Dutchess County also called Oswego.
2. He is sometimes mistakenly called Obediah I. Cooper in Fishkill records presumably because transcribers could not tell a cursive I from a J or, if intended, then perhaps to distinguish himself from his cousin Obediah Jacob Cooper, who, however lived in Albany County. Like his half-dozen cousins also named Obediah Cooper, he was distinguished from the others by the use of his father's first name initial in the Dutch patronym style. His father's name was John, hence his middle initial J. The use of the British-Canadian spelling Obediah rather than the American spelling Obadiah is intentional on my part because that was the original spelling, the first Obediah Cooper in America having immigrated from England in Queen Anne's reign. I have a certificate from my great-grandfather in which he cleary handwrites his father's name as Charles Obediah Spencer.
3. Sloat is the usual modern spelling. It was also spelled Slutt, Slot, Sloet, Sloote, Sloate and other imaginitve spellings, but usually Sloot in Dutch records. Regardless of spelling, the name was pronounced with a long O.
4. Ruth used the middle initial W in the NYS 1865 census, in realty transactions, and throughout her pension files. From that it is easy to extrapolate that the middle name was Wiltsie after her grandmother because her granddaughter was named in the same fashion: Ruth Cooper Spencer. However, there is no actual record found of what W stood for.
5. Ancestral names included Gardenier, Smith, Van Wyck, Meyers, Straetman, and Gildersleeve. Other family names such as Van Bremen and Polhemus were, like half of all Dutch colonials, not actually Dutch. They were German while the Wiltsie immigrant ancestor was born in Copenhagen.
6. Ancestral names included Jung, Riclaus, Ellsworth, and Brill.
7. No birth records for them are found. Their birth dates are deduced from other records.
8. Henry Van Vleck II (1747-after 1787) was the son of Henry Van Vleck I and Cornelia Lewis. The Van Vlack Family genealogy transposes the identities of Henry and Mary's children Elizabeth and Henry III with their first cousins of the same names, the children of John H. and Elizabeth Brinckerhoff Van Vleck. The Henry who married Polly Vantine and died in Poughkeepsie in 1812, and the Elizabeth who married Cornelius Luyster of Fishkill were the children of John and Elizabeth, not Henry and Mary.
9. There is a mysterious Peter Van Vlack in the Prince Edward County Militia, aged 38 in 1822 (i.e. born circa 1784, only two years after the last recorded date of Henry and Mary's children.) He served as a witness for the wedding of Henry III's daughter Eleanor in 1836, a role often taken by the bride's uncle. I cannot otherwise identify him.
There were three daughters named Cornelia, christened in 1776, 1779, and 1780. The third christening recorded 26 December 1780 at Hopewell DRC is usually overlooked.
10. Pioneer Life on the Bay of Quinte.
11. See Poughkeepsie newspapers and the Manchester Bridge Cemetery in Dutchess County for details on some of their children. One of them was named Obediah C. Osborn apparently in honor of Caty's step-father.
12. There was a marriage recorded in Fishkill in 1803 between Obediah Cooper and the widow Mary Thorne, whose maiden name was also Cooper. Some researchers have concluded that this Obediah Cooper was Obediah J. Cooper, but this is incorrect. Obediah J. Cooper was already in Canada and a later deed and court case show that this other Obediah was a resident of Fishkill. All the other half-dozen Obediah Coopers being accounted for, I conclude that he may have been an otherwise undocumented son of Cornelius Cooper . He was never the head of a household having lived first with his father (who outlived him) and then with his brother-in-law/cousin Jacobus 'James' O. Cooper, the legal figure behind almost all of the deeds and wills drawn up in the Cooper family (and who was incidently the uncle of Peter Cooper, the founder of Cooper Union in New York City). This Obediah would have been a good dozen years younger than his cousin-wife Mary Cooper Thorne Cooper. There were no children of this marriage.
13. The only Hannah Van Vleck spinster or widow I could find was the Annatje born in 1782 who was Ruth's half-sister, but I don't think Ruth married her own nephew.
14. There is no birth record that I know of for Obediah Cooper Spencer but he was very consistent about his age in all records.
15. His birthplace is indicated in his marriage record where he is called "of Prescott, Upper Canada." He had not lived in Prescott since he was six years old, but no matter. One was "of" the place one was born regardless of the length of stay there, like John of Gaunt [Ghent]. The transcription of Obediah's marriage record of 1841 which I have personally examined is located at Christ Church Episcopal in Oswego, NY. That he was born in Canada is indisputable; he took the trouble to become a naturalized U.S. citizen while in Oswego in 1844. His step-father Henry Weeks signed as a witness.
16. Charles Spencer (1788 Shaftesbury, VT - 1824 Prescott, Grenville, Ontario). His father and brother founded Spencerville in Edwardsburgh town in Grenville County. His first wife Catherine was called Catherine Seler (sic) in an article in the Willimantic Journal, Volume XVII dating Fri. 26 Feb, 1864, which also gives Charles an entirely different birth date from other genealogies. Since there was no Seler family, perhaps Seleye or Selick was meant. In any case, the Lorimier family claims her, saying that she was Louise-Catherine de Lorimier, born in Quebec. There were several family connections between the Spencers and the Lorimiers, who were known locally, so it seems entirely plausible. The only way to reconcile the discrepancy is if Catherine, who was about six years older than Charles, was previously married.
17. Charles Spencer was, like virtually every Spencer in Ontario in this early time frame, a descendant of the well-known Four Spencer Brothers who each immigrated from England to a different New England colony in the 17th century. I expected that Obediah C. Spencer, whose descendants (including my father who donated the sample) have clean and clear genealogical links back to him, would be a DNA match to other Four Spencer Brothers descendants. DNA testing showed conclusively that there was no match, not only not with other Four Spencer Brothers descendants, but also not with any other of the hundreds of Spencers in the database. There were, however, superficial matches at low marker levels with several other persons in the database, so I duly set about seeing whether there were any points at which their possible ancestors could have crossed paths with my father's, and with one exception, there were none. The exception was Hare, a name I recognized immediately from my research on the Coopers and treated at first as a coincidence. I had also reluctantly rejected Charles Spencer as a candidate for Obediah's father even though he seemed so likely to fit because: his wife's name was said to be Catherine, he had two sons born where Obediah couldn't fit, and while close, Spencerville isn't Prescott quite exactly. When there was no DNA match with the Four Brothers descendants, that seemed to seal it. But I changed my mind when I re-examined the case and came across the newspaper report of Charles' death that I had inexplicably never seen before. From it I learned that he actually died in Prescott and not Spencerville, and that he left five children, not three. The other low level DNA matches proving to be unmatching at upgrades, I finally contacted the Hares, who were actually unaware at the time that they had a low level match between them. Upon finding closely matching results at higher resolution with two Hares, I can now say with complete confidence that Obediah Cooper Spencer was fathered by a Hare, a son or grandson of Stephen Hare (1747 Kinderhook, Columbia, NY - 1845 Haldimand, Northumberland, Ontario), the progenitor of all the Hares in the Bay of Quinte at that time. (The Hares in Grenville County were later arrivals from Ireland.) (The matches also proved of course that Stephen, David, and Jacob Hare all came from the same Hare family.) There are several candidates for the Mr. Hare who fathered Obediah of which I am aware, but since all but one of them will be innocent, I will decline to name them publicly.
18. That this child actually existed is well inferred. Both her 1865 NYS census and her obituary claim that Ruth was the mother of eight children. Census records, Henry's will, and the Francis Weekes genealogy all show that the youngest six only were the children of Henry Weeks. In both the 1830 and 1840 censuses, a second son born between 1821 and 1825 is shown in Henry's household, born before Ruth and Henry married and left Canada.
19. In the 1865 NYS census, Ruth said she had been married twice.
20. They had four children before Hannah died. James remarried to Nancy White about 1829, had two more daughters and like his half-brother John, became a Quaker and lived in Hallowell for the rest of his life, dying in 1879.
21. Abram remained in Cherry Valley when Henry Weeks took their father James to Oswego in 1826.
22. From the Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository, Volume 3. The notice was published in September of 1824 which has given rise to an erroneous death date of September 1824, but the article clearly says "on Friday the 27th", which fell in August in 1824, not September. Charles Spencer's death date is 27 August 1824.
23. John Osborn Weeks had 3 children by his first marriage and one daughter from his second marriage, however, none of his children themselves had any children. John's line is extinct.


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