On the Trail of William Wood, One of Sandwich's Ten Men

There are times when I'm in the midst of writing about history that I wonder why I chose this task. Why didn't I choose to write about someone who's actually living and breathing? Someone like Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Downey, Jr., or even Brad Pitt? 

      

          I envy authors who write current biographies. They can search the internet for news articles. They can read People magazine with its juicy gossip and glossy, color-saturated photos. And, of course, they can arrange to interview their glamorous subjects in fancy restaurants where they can sit in comfortable chairs and talk and laugh and share numerous bottles of expensive red wines. But after gathering dry facts from dry history books and poring through dusty archive files containing the occasional grainy photo, a historical biographer like me can only get to know her subject by using her imagination. 

          After reading more than a few history books, I still knew relatively little about my subject, William Wood, other than that he was one of the Ten Men of Saugus who founded the town of Sandwich in 1637. There were no cameras back then, and no one painted a portrait of him. He was about twenty when he came to America, and he must have dressed like a Pilgrim or a Puritan. Maybe he looked something like this:

          Not exactly sexy. Definitely not Brad Pitt. But William Wood was an author, and for me, that's cool. He wrote New England's Prospect, and he was also Sandwich's first town clerk. 

          Town clerks write. They record marriages, births, and deaths. It makes sense that the early settlers would have chosen Wood to be town clerk because he liked to write - and he was good at it; he had written and published a book. I knew it would be hopeless to find any artifacts that Wood left behind; something like that wouldn't help me much anyway. But I wondered if I might be able to find a document he wrote. 

          Historic imagination has to be fueled by facts gleaned from documents and artifacts. Documents contain written words. Artifacts are things made by human beings, things like arrowheads and blunderbusses, wooden butter churns and pocket watches, 45mm record players and Model T Fords. Artifacts like these reveal a lot about how things were done at the time the artifact was made. Very old documents are also considered artifacts because historians can learn a lot from them about how things were done during the time when they were written.

          To feed my historical imagination, I visited Plimoth Plantation and talked to the young man who portrays Governor William Bradford in the English village to get an idea of what writing was like in the 1600s. Back then, girls were rarely educated, and those few Pilgrim and Puritan boys who learned how to write used goose-quill pens they made themselves and ink brought to them on ships as they arrived with more settlers from England. Lacking dictionaries, writers were creative spellers, and they formed their letters differently. For example, an f-shaped s was used when the letter s was doubled or used initially. Common abbreviations included wt for with, yt for that, and ye for the.

Plimoth Plantation's Governor William Bradford pens his journal, Of Plimoth Plantation. Notice the ink pot and quill pen.

First page of Governor Bradford's journal. How many misspellings can you find?

Sandwich's Town Hall Annex houses the Town Clerk's office.

          Next I went to Sandwich's town clerk's office on Main Street where some of the oldest documents in Sandwich history are locked in a walk-in safe.

          Sandwich's town clerk is Taylor White. Interestingly, Mr. White has an active interest in preserving town records and making them available to the public through his office. He is creating an electronic searchable database for 75% - 85% of Sandwich's vital records (marriages, births, and deaths) dating back to the early 1650s. He has already finished up to 1885, crosslinking the digital data to images from a book of records published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, an organization that helps family historians. Eventually genealogists will be able to visit Mr. White's office to search for information about their ancestors.

Sandwich's vital records are published in several volumes like this one.

          In the photo below, Mr. White is holding a book of restored documents dating back to 1650. This book contains documents from the early 1650s, when William Wood was living in Sandwich.

Town Clerk Taylor White

          After Mr. White handed me the book of documents, I set it on a side table and began flipping through the pages, looking carefully at the dates. I knew that William Wood sold his Sandwich property sometime in the spring of 1650, so if I wanted to find something he wrote as town clerk, it would have to be dated before then. It didn't take me long to find what I was looking for.

Jan. 4th, An. [in the year]1650  It is agreed upon by the towne to pay unto Richard Bourne 20 shillings... in consideration of his labour and paines that he has taken in businesse concerning the towne... 

          This document most likely was penned by William Wood. Hurrah! 

          Besides imagination, historians are infected by another disease of the mind and heart, and that disease's name is Curiosity. Now that I had found a document written by William Wood, I wondered what his signature might look like. “I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. But most of us also remember that curiosity killed the cat. It can also bring great surprises and deep disappointment. Even though he's not Brad Pitt, I hope you'll continue to read the next installments of my blog to discover what surprises and disappointments were in store for me as I contined to delve into William Wood's life story. 

Helpful Link for the Curious:

For more on early 17th century penmanship: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mosmd/pilpen.jpg