| The subject of this striking
portrait is Jane Oliver Rich, born 22 October
1788 — over two hundred years ago. Jane was
the widow of Stephen Altgelt Rich, and the mother
of nine — a true American matriarch. The
bits of her history we can glean from available
documents take us back to the period just after
the American Revolution, and remind us of how
disruptive the Revolution was, and to what extent
military campaigns drove Colonialist migrations. First, a little background.
What you see here is one of 38 portraits in a
photograph album given to Miss Hannah Rich of
South Kortright, Delaware County, New York. The
album and one picture (of Stephen Struthers) were
given to Hannah on the occasion of her marriage
in 1861 to Mr. William Blakely Peters of
Bloomville, also in Delaware County. Hannah
collected more pictures of relatives and friends,
and they are all presented on this website.
The relationship
between Jane Oliver Rich and Hannah Rich was
this: Hannah’s father was James Rich, a
twice-married and most prolific gentleman. (In
fact, all the Riches were exceedingly prolific,
creating substantial headaches for the
conscientious genealogist.) Hannah’s father
James had a brother, Stephen Altgelt Rich, who
married Jane Oliver in Westchester NY in 1812.
Jane Oliver Rich, then, was Hannah Rich’s
aunt by marriage.
The Oliver family
originated in Scotland, though it is not clear
where Jane herself was born, nor who her parents
were. One possibility is that Jane’s mother
and father were William Oliver and Jane Shields;
a girl, Ellison Oliver, was born to these two in Albany on 25 February 1789. We
can theorize that William Oliver and Jane Shields
were Jane Oliver’s parents as well. The
virtue of this hypothesis is that it would make
Jane the older sister to Ellison; furthermore,
Jane the daughter would have been named after
Jane the mother, a commonly-observed custom of
that day. The difficulty presented by this
hypothesis is that Jane would have to have been
born a mere four months before her younger
sister. It is possible, of course, that one of
these birth dates is incorrect.
Attempting to
locate Olivers in this country is not easy;
Oliver is not a common last name in United
States. We do know there were Olivers in New
England well before the Revolution: a list of
early marriage licenses of the Province of New York , for example, states that
on 03 July, 1736, a Margaret Oliver married a
George Lubeken. That marriage took place in a
Dutch Reformed Church in Long Island, which is
Suffolk county.
In fact, Olivers
may have been among the earliest Long Island
settlers. The Early History of
Suffolk County, Long Island, compiled by Sherrill
Halsey Stevens, Lt Colonel, US Army, retired,
tells us: “Some historians of the town of
Southold argue that on the 15th of August, 1640,
a man named Oliver obtained a deed from Lord
Sterling’s agent, James Farrett, for lands
which he had purchased in this Town[ship].
Therefore if one believes the old records and
Governor Winthrop, there is little doubt that
Southampton was the first English town settled on
Long Island” — and that an Oliver was
among the first of the first.
It is on Long
Island that we catch a closer-than-usual glimpse
of how ordinary people were dislocated by the
American Revolution. Available online is a list
of Patriot Refugee Property
Owners. As
this fascinating site explains, large numbers of
patriots, including most of the Long Island
militia, evacuated their homes when New York City
was occupied by British troops from 1776 to
November 25, 1783. These patriots crossed from
Long Island to Connecticut in 129 ships, 48 of
which were commanded by Long Island refugees;
many of the refugees subsequently enlisted in the
3rd and 4th NY Continental Regiments. Among those
refugees was a Lt. Richard Oliver.
The Patriot
Refugee Property Owners list suggests a reason
for the dispersal of the Oliver Family in New
York State. Let us suppose for a moment that all
the Olivers began life in Suffolk County —
in Long Island. The occupation of New York City
could have forced the Olivers to flee. Many would
have sailed north to Connecticut. Some of them
might have continued on in a counter-clockwise
direction back into New York state. (See the map, inset.) The first official Federal Census, in 1790, reports no Oliver
households at all in Dutchess, Kings (now
Brooklyn), Oneida, Ontario, Orange, Queens,
Saratoga, Schoharie or Westchester counties, or
in Long Island (Suffolk County) itself.
But this same 1790
census finds one Oliver household in Herkimer
County, two in Schenectady County, one in Steuben
County, and one in Ulster County. A small
concentration of Olivers appears in the 1790 enumeration of
Watervliet Township in Albany County: a John Oliver, a
second John Oliver, a John Oliver Junior, an Arie
Oliver, and a Jacobus Oliver. (Parenthetically,
one must wonder what happened to the William
Oliver and Jane Shields mentioned above, parents
of Ellison Oliver, born in 1789 in Albany.)
And there is a
remarkable post-Revolutionary convergence of
Olivers in Bovina Township of Delaware County,
NY, where Hannah Rich—whose photograph album
this is — was born and raised. Early Bovina Families &
Their Descendants, transcribed by Ray LaFever lists
*94* Oliver entries, with a John Oliver, son of
John and Janet (Ray) Oliver, born in 1825, the
earliest recorded Oliver birth in Bovina. This
list also includes a number of Olivers who left
Scotland in the 1830s and settled in Bovina
township, and another unfortunate group who
contracted “ship fever” (epidemic
typhus) on the way over and promptly died when
they reached the United States.
So where does this
leave our matriarch? We don’t know where she
was born, nor do where know how she and Stephen
Altgelt Rich met. At some point they migrated to
Westchester County, NY, and were married there in
1812. According to the second section of the
Biographical Review: The Leading Citizens of Delaware
County, NY
, as well as FamilySearch, the genealogical resource
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
Saints, they had nine children, all in
Westchester, NY: James B Rich, born 1813; Mary,
b. 1814 or 1815; Charlotte, b. 1817; Rachel, b.
1818; Robert F, born 1820; Jane, b. 1821; Hannah,
b. 1822; Elizabeth, b. 1824; and Andrew, b. 1825.
The biographical Review tells us Jane died 25
February 1868.
At the time of
this writing, Spring 2005, detailed vital
statistics of Westchester County are not
available online. When they are, the story of
Jane Oliver Rich and Stephen Altgelt Rich in the
early United States will truly begin to unfold.
|
About the photographer:
This picture was taken by Abraham Bogardus, one
of the premier practitioners of the art in his
day. For further information about this
extraordinary man, see his annotated biography
under the photograph of 
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