Early
Work
Anyone who
wants to look into the history of the Imus family in America should begin, of
course, with the work of those who have already done so. That means
finding copies of the typescripts of
"The Imus Family" by Raymond McKinley Imus and the much larger
compilation of the same title by Jerald A. Cunningham, although Jerald's work
incorporates much of Raymond's. I will comment of the usefulness of these works
shortly, but even before these, interest was shown in their origins by Imus
family members. The earliest published accounts are those of Thomas Imus of
Mendota, Illinois and his son Newton. Thomas was the last child of the founding
father of the Imus clan in America, William Imus (1739-1835) of Arlington, Vermont.
The stories told by Thomas and Newton, Raymond and Jerald reveal something
about the growth of both fact and legend as descendants explore their roots.
The earliest published versions of these stories appear in the History of La
Salle County, Illinois published in Chicago in 1886. It contains the
following sketches:
Newton Imus, senior member of
the firm of Imus & Fritz, marble dealers, Mendota, Ill., was born in North
Adams, Mass., in 1846. When he was
three years of age his parents moved to Bennington County, Vt., and in 1857 to
La Salle County, Ill. His father, Thomas Imus, in company with Mr. Thayer,
established the marble and granite works, and in 1862 he became sole
proprietor. Newton worked for his father till 1866, when he succeeded him in the
business, and in 1879 the present firm was formed. It is the only marble
establishment in Mendota, and has a large trade, the annual sales amounting to
between $12,000 and $15,000. Mr. Imus married Isabel Wirrick, a native of Paw
Paw, Ill., born in 1849. They have two children--Albert Wade and Mabel.
Thomas Imus was born in 1815 in
Bennington County, Vt. He was also reared in that county, being brought up a
farmer. At the age of twenty years he began the marble trade. He was married in
North Adams, Mass., to Louisa Gleason, born in 1821, at Halifax, Windham Co.,
Vt. They have but two children--Newton and Mattie. [p. 711]
This succinct
account, which makes no mention of the family’s English antecedants, is
expanded fours years later in another "mug book", Biographical and
Genealogical Record of La Salle County Illinois illustrated, by the Lewis
Publishing Company, also of Chicago.
Thomas
Imus
The
venerable gentleman whose name heads this sketch and who resides
at the corner of Fifth street and Second
avenue, Mendota, Illinois, came
here
from the Green Mountain state in 1856, and has lived here ever since,
an honored and respected citizen. He
has marked the town's growth from
its infancy. At the time he arrived
it had only one store, that owned by
Giles & Wells. He engaged in the
marble business, which he conducted
successfully until about 1880, when
he sold out, having since then lived
retired from active life.
Thomas Imus was born in Bennington
county, Vermont, in the town of
Arlington, August 21, 1815, a son of
William and Annie (Rising) Imus,
the former a native of London,
England, and the latter of Suffield, Con-
necticut. Six children composed
their family, two sons and four daughters,
all of whom have passed away except
the subject of this sketch, who was
the youngest. The father was a
watchmaker by trade, which he followed
in the early part of his life. He
came to America in 1753, located in
Suffield, and subsequently removed
to Bennington county, Vermont.
where he became the owner of about
one hundred and fifty acres of land
and where he spent the rest of his
life in agricultural pursuits. He died in 1830,
at the
age of ninety-six years. He was twice married. By his first wife,
Lucy
Buck, he had nine children, and by his second wife six, the subject of
our
sketch being one of the latter. The second wife was eighty-four years old
at the
time of her death. They were all Episcopalians. During the Revolutionary
war
William Imus was three times drafted into the service, but would not fight
against
his own country and relations, and each time hired a substitute.
The paternal grandfather of our
subject was William Imus. He was the
father of four sons, and was a large
property owner. He lived and died in
England. The maternal grandfather
also was an Englishman. He came to
America in the eighteenth century,
settled on a New England farm and
devoted his energies to agricultural
pursuits the rest of his life and
reached a ripe old age.
Thomas Imus, the direct subject of
this review, was reared on his
father's farm in Vermont, and after his father's death he began learning
the marble-cutter's trade, being at
that time twenty-one years of age.
On the 28th of February, 1845, he
married Miss Louisa Gleason, a
daughter of Newton and Annis (Mixer)
Gleason, and two children, a
son and daughter, were born to them.
The son, Newton, married Isabella
Wyrick and lives in Mendota; they
have one child named Mabel. The
daughter, Mattie, is the wife of
William E. Wixom, and they have one
child, named Blossom. Mrs. Thomas
Imus died August 2, 1894, at the
age of seventy-three years. She was
a devoted Christian and a member
of the Baptist church.
Mr. Imus has always been a
temperance man, and in his younger years
was a member of the Rechabites and
the Good Templars. Also he was
for years a member of the Masonic
fraternity. His early political
affiliation was with the Whig party,
and when the Republican party
was organized he identified himself
with it and has since given it his
support. For a number of years he
was a school director in Mendota,
and his influence has always been
directed on the side of right and
progress. Now in his old age he
enjoys the confidence and esteem of
his many friends in the town where
he has lived for nearly a century.
[pp. 417-8]
Thomas Imus
died in 1900, the year in which the above sketches were published. Lastly, in
1924, Michael Cyprian O'Byrne published a History of LaSalle County
Illinois, in which we find the most elaborated account of Thomas, Newton
and their ancestors and descendants, although it drops all notice of any
English progenitors of William Imus.
NEWTON
IMUS. No one name has been more conspicuously identified with
the changing history of the City of Mendota
during the past seventy years
than that of Imus. Mr. Newton Imus is now a retired
business man, but
still keeps in touch with the town's
affairs.
Newton Imus was born at North Adams,
Massachusetts, March 4, 1846.
His grandfather, William Imus, came
to America from London in 1756,
and for many years lived in
Bennington County, Vermont, where he
engaged in farming and where he died
in 1830. He failed to take a part
in the activities of the "Green
Mountain Boys" in the American Revolution
because of the Tory sympathies of
his first wife.
Thomas Imus, youngest child of
William Imus, was born in Vermont,
August 21, 1815. His mother was
Annie Rising, whose family were sur-
vivors of the ill-fated attempt of
Sweden to establish a colony in America.
As a
young man Thomas Imus learned the marble-cutter's trade. He married
Louisa
Gleason in 1845 at North Adams, Massachusetts, but shortly after
the
birth of his son Newton he moved his family to his old home in Vermont.
In 1857
the family moved again, this time to Mendota, Illinois. He established
the
first marble shop in Mendota, and continued in business until succeeded
by his
son. Thomas Imus was a whig, an active temperance man, a believer
in the
abolition of slavery, and in the years before the Civil war was a
"conductor"
of the "Underground Railroad." When the republican party was
organized
he affiliated himself with it.
Newton Imus attended school in
Vermont and in Mendota, learned the marble
cutter's
trade in his father's shop and in 1866 took over the business, in which
he
continued until 1913. During a part of the time he was in partnership with
George
Fritz, who had been a boyhood schoolmate.
Newton Imus married in Mendota
Harriet Isabella Wirick, who was a
daughter of William Wirick, formerly
of East Paw Paw, Illinois. Mrs. Imus
has been associated with many
activities in her community. She was a
member of the Ladies' Cemetery Aid
Association, a charter member of
the Mendota Woman's Club, which she
served many years as president and
in the work of which she is actively engaged and deeply
interested. She
is a member of and has served as
officer in several lodges, and has been
for many years a member of the
Graves Public Library Board.
Mr. and Mrs. Imus had two children, Wade, who died at the age of
eighteen, and Mabel, who has lived
and taught at Savanna, Illinois, since
being graduated from Northwestern
University.
Mr. Imus had served his community in
several public capacities. He
was
for six years, 1872-78, an alderman for the Fourth Ward. He was
mayor from 1905 to 1909 and again
from 1911 to 1913. As mayor he
was active in the campaign for
better streets, and under his influence
the first paving was laid in 1906.
This was one of the early towns to
secure an electric light and power
plant and Mr. Imus was one of the
early stockholders of the company
and retained his stock until it was
taken over by the Illinois Northern
Utilities Company. He served
eighteen consecutive years on the
school board, and was instrumental
in bringing Mr. W. R. Foster to
Mendota, a service of which he is
justly proud. He was for twenty-two
years county supervisor, and
was several times sent as the
board's delegate to the State Conventions
of County Supervisors, serving one
year as president of the convention.
Mr. Imus was for many years a member
of the local fair association
and was interested in horse racing.
He was often in demand as a
starting judge, and while serving in
that capacity at the State Fair at
Springfield in 1897 he started
thirty-one heats in one day, thus
establishing the world's record. For
many years Mr. Imus' favorite
hobby
was the study of agriculture, with special attention to soil fertility,
and he took
great pleasure in having his theories demonstrated on his
own
farm, where the experiments were highly successful. [pp. 256-8]
Beside being
fairly typical exercises in the pious
and patriotic clichés of the mugbook genre, these successive accounts reveal
how people fashion lasting images of themselves. Note also the refinement of
such details as the name of Newton's wife and various dates in the accounts.
Thomas’s mother becomes Swedish. People come and go as well; Lucy Buck
disappears, and also Blossom Wixom, who happens to represent the only line of
the founding father's last child to survive to the present day.
When we look at
the genealogical efforts of later Imus family descendants, we find not only
what we would expect--further refinements in the accuracy of reporting names
and dates--but also some curious loss and distortion of the earlier data. Take the case of Raymond
McKinley Imus. Born in 1894 in Kalama, Washington, Raymond graduated from the
University of Washington and served as a history teacher and vice principal
of various Seattle area high schools.
He pursued genealogy by interviews and correspondence with Imus family members,
mostly in the Los Angeles and Seattle areas. I detect no use of primary or even
secondary published sources in his work. Here is what he has to say about the
English origins of the family:
There was living in London about the year 1700 a wealthy
jeweler named
Joseph
Imus. How or why the Imuses came to Spain and later England will
probably
never be known. But the facts show that Lord Sterling had a sister
who
married this merchant who was quite well-to-do. To this union were
born
two sons, Lonzo and William, and this latter, being also the younger,
proved
to be too democratic to suit the aristocratic tastes of his parents.
No sources for
these alleged facts are here or anywhere else provided. That Spanish connection
will be explored in an excursus in the Appendix. We probably should not even
try to guess why Raymond thought that the American William's father was not
named William but rather Joseph, and when Jerald Cunningham
copied Thomas Imus’ account of his grandfather, he too changed William
to Joseph—presumably out of deference to Raymond’s views. We may,
however, conjecture that the fanciful connection with a "Lord
Sterling" was spun out of the fact that the three Imus gravestones in the
yard of the Episcopal church of St. James in Arlington, Vermont are those of
William, Lucy, and Sterling. More about this alleged "Sterling"
connection later. Note also that Thomas Imus' account of "four sons"
has now become "two", but let Raymond continue:
This William Imus, the first who was to play such a large
part in the history
of the
Imus family, was born in London in the month of May, 1735. His father
took
him into the establishment, and he was apprenticed to learn the goldsmith's
trade.
Upon reaching the age of 21, he became very much infatuated with a
certain
London lass whom he desired to marry. The parents, feeling that the girl
was
beneath his social status, opposed the marriage severely, whereupon he
emigrated
to America, arriving in Connecticut in 1757.
Needless to
say, there is no evidence whatsoever for this romance, nor do records of the
goldsmiths guild or the clockmakers include any Imus. Please go on:
Here he traveled for a number of years as a clock and
watchmaker and repairer.
Later
he moved to Vermont, where he settled about 1760. He first married an
English
girl, who was a Tory during the Revolution. This may account for the
fact
that he never served in the Continental Army, sending a substitute at two
different
times. He remained a patriot, however, and the Continental Government
gave
him a grant of land for valuable services he rendered to the Continental
Army
during the Revolutionary War.
The real facts are both more
interesting and more complicated than those in Raymond's account. The earliest
notices of William appear in the deedbooks of New Milford, Connecticut in the
late 1760s and suggest that he married Lucy Buck in 1770. The family of the
“English girl” had been living in the colonies for over a century. William then
ran afoul of the patriots as will be revealed later. Raymond's account
continues with another contributed by one of his correspondents:
James Henry Imus, president of the Ohio Rake Co., at
Dayton, Ohio, has the
following
to say: "William Imus had an older brother who stayed with his
father
in London, and they were goldsmiths, who, upon the death of his father
came to
New Amsterdam, now called New York [as it had been since 1664!]
in
search of his brother, but died before finding him, but not until my great
grandfather
heard that he was there, and he went to the village of New York,
and
shipped the body back to London. He was quite an orchardist and developed
a very
remarkable pear and named it the Imus pear. When he moved to
Arlington,
he took the tree with him and it was still producing fruit 20 years
ago
(1900). Scions were cut and grafted from this pear and planted in different
orchards
all through the New England States. During the Revolutionary War,
the
Continental Army gave him a grant of land for valuable services which he
rendered
the Army. I had a talk some 35 years ago with two old men who knew
of his
history and what he did for the Continental Army."
What William
actually did for the patriots is still unclear, and no “grant of land” has
surfaced, but what we do know will be discussed shortly. Raymond's account of
the founding father and his brothers now approaches conclusion:
Another account is that the older brother in England
died, leaving
William
heir to the large estate. A 3rd brother younger than William,
came to America to find him, and, though he advertised,
William
was never found. William never heard from his father's
home after
leaving England. William spent most of his life at
Arlington,
Vermont, as a farmer. He was married three times, and had
a second
family
of six children after he was 60 years of age, 14 children in
all. He was an Episcopalian. He died March 20, 1835, in
the
ninety-six
year of his age, ( born about 1739) and
is buried at
Arlington, Vermont.
Raymond later
adds this remarkable non-fact: "He first married Lucy Hurd at Arlington,
Vt." It is likely that he picked
up—if he did not himself contribute--this error, which persists until today,
from the following entry in the notoriously unreliable compilation by Frederick
Virkus, The Abridged Compendium of American Genealogy, First Families of
America.
"Winchell,
Alexander Newton: 5- William Imus (b. 1739), from Eng.
to Conn., ca. 1758, soon after to Arlington, Vt., m. Lucy
Hurd; 4-
William (1773-1853), m. Avis Bates; 3- Alonzo
(1799-1887),
m. Eunice Vaughn; 2- Son of Newton Horace Winchell
(1839-1914),
m. 1864 Charlotte Sophia Imus (b. 1836); issue: 1- Horace
Vaughn
(1865-1923); m. Ida Belle, dau. Alexander Winchel);
2..5"
[Vol. 1, p. 895-6].
Virkus
may have received this misinformation from the Winchell family, Raymond
repeated it, and Lucy Hurd is unfortunately with us still. A later version of
this information, without Lucy Hurd, appears in Sir John Bernard Burke’s A
Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain, 16th
ed., London, 1939:
Newton Horace Winchell, State Geologist, Minnesota, 1872-1910,
b.
17
Dec. 1839; m. 24 Aug. 1864, Charlotte Sophia (b. 28 May, 1836;
d. 26 Mar. 1926) dau. of Alonzo Imus (grandson of William
Imus who
settled at Arlington, Vermont, in ca. 1760), and d. 2 May
1914, having
had issue.
Raymond then notes "William married the second time at
White Creek, N.Y. to Anna Rising, about 1782." This is later corrected to
1802 in my copy, and finally he says "William married a third time, no
children and wife's name unknown, but her sayings are still repeated in Arlington,
Vt." This phantom third wife
results from a misunderstanding of the inscription on Lucy [Buck's] tombstone,
which reads:
Lucy,
consort of Wm. Imus
April
4, 1801 in
The
55th year of her age
Vain
world farewell to you.
Heaven
is my native air:
I bid
my friends a short adieu
Impatient
to be there.
A consort is a wife, not a proper name, and Lucy remains
Lucy Buck, William's first and most hopeful companion.
My xerox copy
of the work of Raymond McKinley Imus, dated June 1, 1929, comes from a retyping
in January, 1960 by Henry O. Imus, Jr. [3180 Vista del Mar, Glendale 8, CA from
a carbon of the original. This copy was in the Branciforte Branch of the Public
Library of Santa Cruz, CA, catalogued as R 929.2 Im 9.] The version used by
Jerald Cunningham dates from 1938. There are minor differences between the two
texts; for example, the later version adds the weird misinformation that the
phantom third wife, “possibly Lucy Consort, is still remembered in Arlington
for her saying, ‘Ye can't tell time by the steelyards.’” [For what it’s worth,
a steelyard is one of those old balances with a hook on one end of a
beam and a moveable counterweight on the other; not that anyone we know
would try to tell time by one]. Stranger still, the substitute ultimate patriarch
now becomes Joseph Lincoln Imus.
Raymond's work
contrasts sharply with that of Jerald Ardith Cunningham, a tireless compiler
and searcher of primary documents. Born in 1924 in Rutland, Iowa to John A.
Evans Cunningham and Agnes Belle Imus, Jerald “served in Third Army HQ under
Gen. Patton during WW II, graduated from Simpson College, received an MA from
University of Denver. He studied at the University of California, the
University of Birmingham, England, Union Theological Seminary, and Sacramento State
College. He taught at Parsons College, Missouri Valley College, CCNY, and was
Associate Professor and Associate Chairman of the Speech, Theatre, Radio and
Television Department at Kennedy-King College, the City Colleges of Chicago.” The source of this information is discussed
next.
In 1980, Jerald
issued a 108-page, single-space typescript gloss to the history compiled by
Raymond McKinley Imus. It presented vast amounts of new data gathered both from
original sources and the submissions of Imus family members. In particular, it
made use of federal censuses, military archives, and newspaper items. His
genealogy does not use any numbering system, relying solely on indentation to
suggest relationships. Over the next ten years, Jerald issued annual “addenda”
with much new information keyed to his original compilation. These additions
totaled 178 pages. To this entire compilation, Debbie Kelly of Red Bluff, CA,
prepared an Index of 48 typed pages. [Its use is made difficult by the Arabic
numeral pagination of the first 108 pages of Cunningham's compilation, the
Roman numeral pagination of the addenda (sometimes incorrect) and the failure
of her software program to recognize Roman numerals as numerals. In standard
enumeration, the whole work now comprises 335 typescript pages.] Although his
10th addendum announced that he would not be issuing further supplements,
Jerald has said in private correspondence that he is still accepting data for
publication.
Although he
makes no attempt to correct or verify Raymond's assertions, Jerald does add new
information about the English antecedents of the Imus family. This data comes
from “research by William H. Compton, Knoxville, Tennessee.” I have checked it
all against the original English documents and it is uniformly incorrect or
irrelevant. Therefore, I will not repeat it here. However, some unknown source
contributed a crucial fact to Jerald's "Addenda V", for 1985,
p. xxxviii. "Esther Imus, daughter of William and Mary Imus, c. February
3, 1788 Bethel [i.e. Bethnal] Green, St. Mathew [sic], London, England."
This item leads us to the most popular current resource for researching English
forebears.
I am referring
to the International Genealogical Index devised by the Family History Library
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- the Mormons. This index
of data, extracted from original documents (mostly parish registers) by trained
church volunteers, as well as that contributed by church members accomplishing
temple ordinances for the dead, is now also on the internet and is the most
frequently used search tool for foreign queries. But it is only an index, and a
partial one at that, referencing the registers of some 15% of the 12,000
English parishes. And it has its own indexing strategies. For example, when
queried for names related to Imus, the Index comes up with 784 names distributed into 269 families. Of these only one is really Imus, viz. that
Esther Imus, christened 3 Feb 1788 at Saint Matthew's church, Bethnal Green,
London, daughter of William and Mary Imus [FHL film 855,938]. The appearance of
a William Imus and his father Joseph "married to a sister of Lord
Sterling" in the IGI is derived directly from repetitions of the early
speculations of Raymond M. Imus and has no published evidence behind it. All of
the other names are variants. For example (with their frequencies in
parentheses):
(1) First order
variants: IMMS (186), IMES (30), IMS (27), IMMES (13), IMAS (3), IMUS (2),
IHMES (2), IMYES (1), IYMES (1), etc.
(2) Second
order variants suggested for searching: ALMS, AM, AMAS, AMOS, EAMES, EMASS,
EME, EMMEY, EMPS, HALME, HAMES, HAWME, HEM, HEMIS, HEMUS, HIME, HULME, IMM,
OHAM, OHELM, OMISH, OYME.
OYME indeed! We
do find such intriguing items as a William IMMS and his wife Elizabeth, whose
daughter Ann was christened at Saint Paul, Deptford, London on 11 Aug 1747; and
a William IMES and wife Elizabeth, whose son Thomas was christened at Saint
Martin in the Fields on 21 Jan 1766, and, outside of London, those like William
IMAS whose son Caleb was ch. at Weston on Avon, Gloucester in May 1715, and
even a William IMMS, son of William and Anne, ch. at Bromyard, Hereford on 24
Aug 1714.
Nevertheless,
after long looking, I have become
convinced that looking for IMUS among the IMMS is a deadend. Starting anew, I
decided to work from the known to the unknown and so returned to that Esther
Imus. The parish register of St. Matthew's, Bethnal Green yielded the following
items, with the years covered by the source films in brackets:
John HIMUS -
Christening: 23 Oct 1754 Father: John
HIMUS Mother: Sarah
[1746-1790 FHL
film 0855938, fiche 6900605]
Thomas HIMUS - Christening: 21
Sep 1757 Father: John HIMUS Mother:
Sarah
[1746-1790 FHL
film 0855938, fiche 6900605]
Esther IMUS -
Christening: 3 Feb 1788 Father: William IMUS Mother: Mary
[FHL film
855938]
Sarah HIMUS -
Marriage: 15 Sep 1788 Spouse: John
BEVERLY
[1777-1802 FHL
film 0849419, fiche 6900157]
John HIMUS -
Christening: 7 Mar 1792 Father: William HIMUS
Mother: Mary
[1791-1799 FHL
film 0855939, fiche 6900605]
Mary Ann HYMAS
- Marriage: 5 Aug 1877 Spouse: William
Uriah BIGGS
[1875-1879 FHL
film 0849427, fiche 6900157]
These data
suggest that a more fruitful set of names to associate with IMUS might be
HIMUS, and the International Genealogical Index collects these under HYMAS not
IMMS. A corroborating bit of evidence is that William Imus appears in the
Vermont First Census of the United States in 1790 as "Himas,
William."
Now it should
be noted that Bethnal Green is one of the East London parishes and former
boroughs, which, like Shoreditch, Hackney, Stepney, and Poplar, are the
province of Cockney and related dialects notorious for dropping initial h- and postvocalic -r. Thus IMUS, HIMUS, HYMUS
and even names like HEIMERS, may all be pronounced alike. HYMAS alone yields
587 instances in an IGI search, HYMUS 224, HIMUS 69, HYMASS and HIMAS 34 each,
HIGHMAS 22, HIGHMASS 4, and HIGHMUS and HYMUSE 1 each. Furthermore, along with
these names is that of HINDMARSH, with 12 Williams in the decade around 1739.
What this abundance and variety suggest to me is that we are dealing with one
original name and a great deal of
idiosyncratic spelling among parish clerks.
But even among the East Enders
in all these names, if we are looking for a William, son of William, born in
London within ten years of 1739, with three brothers, I haven't found him yet.
So the search continues.
One source of population flow into East London comes down the
old Roman roads from East Anglia. If we follow the records of this stream back
through the communities of Walthamstow, Chelmsford and Braintree, and then up
the valley of the river Pant, we find a concentration of names deriving from
HYMAS in the rolling hills at the juncture of the counties of Essex,
Cambridgeshire, and Suffolk. There, near the headwaters of the Granta, in
villages like Castle Camps, Shudy Camps, Ashdon, Horseheath and Hockley, we
find the records of dozens of HYMAS candidates for later emigration to London.
Here are some examples, although there are problems with all of them:
John Hymus m. Mary
Buttolph 27 Nov 1722 Castle Camps, Cambridgeshire. Children:
i. John ch. 14 Oct 1723
ii. William ch. 21 Jun 1731
iii. Mary ch. 13 Apr 1735
iv. Sarah ch. 25 Dec 1740
v. Catharine ch. 16 Mar 1745
vi. Thomas ch. 11 Jan 1746
vii. Anne ch. 11 Mar 1749
viii. Sarah ch. 16 Aug 1752
ix. Buttle ch. 16 May 1756, m. 11 Dec 1782,
bur. 25 Apr 1822
x. Alice ch. 24 Jun 1759
xi. John ch. 14 Oct 1759, bur. 4 Nov 1759
xii. John ch. 25 Jul 1762
Problem: Father not named William.
William Hymas m.
Deborah ca. 1738, Castle Camps, Cambridgeshire. Children:
i. William ch. 18 Feb 1738, bur. 20 Jan
1739/40.
ii. Mary ch. 15 Jun 1740
iii. William ch. 8 Mar 1740/1
iii. Sarah ch. 10 Jul 1743
iv. Eliza ch. 17 Feb 1744
v. Catharine ch. 19 Jun 1748
vi. Deborah ch. 14 May 1749
vii. Ann ch. 9 Dec 1750
viii. Martha ch. 26 Nov 1752
Problem: No brothers, but many sisters.
William HYMAS - Marriage: 22 Jun 1751 Castle Camps,
Cambridge, England to Hannah [Ann,
Anna] Rawlinson b. 2 Sep 1732, bur. 4
Apr 1769, Children:
i. John ch. 1 Sep 1751, bur. 17 Nov 1751.
ii. John ch. 21 Aug 1752
iii. Sarah ch. 2 Mar 1755
iv. William ch. 20 Feb 1757
v. Judith ch. 4 Mar 1759, m. Henry Osborne
29 Apr 1781
vi. Edward ch. 21 Jun 1761
vii. Samuel ch. 14 May 1763, bur. 18 May 1763
viii. Hannah ch. 2 Mar 1766
ix. Maria ch. 20 Mar 1768, bur. 12 Jun 1768
Problem: Son William born too late.
If we throw in the similarly proniunced name HINDMARSH, we have
another candidate:
William Hindmarsh, b. 1718 at Alnwick, Northumberland, d. Aug
1773, m. 21 Jan 1737, Ann Richardson. Children:
i.
John Hindmarsh, ch. 19 Apr 1738, Alnwick,
Northumberland
ii.
Robert Hindmarsh, ch. 12 Dec 1739
iii.
John Hindmarsh, ch. 21 Dec 1841
iv.
Luke Hindmarsh, ch. 23 Nov 1743
v.
Margaret Hindmarsh, ch. 7 Dec 1745
vi.
William Hindmarsh, ch. 9 Dec 1747
vii.
James Hindmarsh, ch. 22 Nov 1749
viii.
James Hindmarsh, ch. 29 May 1753
ix.
Ann Hindmarsh, ch. 13 Aug 1755, all born at
Alnwick
Problem: William is a little late and pretty far north.
Even with these problems, it is among families like these that
William Imus of Arlington, Vermont is likely to be found at his first
home.