What this is. The oldest ground this family stands on: Gosport, a town on the Isles of Shoals — bare rocks nine miles out from Portsmouth, visible from the mainland on a clear day. The Voudys and their neighbours the Muchemores ran the town and the meeting house there before any of them lived at York.
Why it matters. When the Isles were evacuated during the Revolution the records largely stop, and that gap is why several joints in this family are still open.
"This eighteenth day of March it is voted that William Muchemore Moderator; Joseph Muchemor Town Clarke; Edward Vowdey, George Randal, Jeffrey Muchemore Seelekt Men."
That is the town book of Gosport, New Hampshire, for 18 March 1773, spelled the way the clerk spelled it. Three Muchemores and a Voudy, running a town.
The town was on Star Island, in the Isles of Shoals — nine miles out into the Atlantic off Portsmouth, a scatter of bare rock straddling the line between Maine and New Hampshire. That is where this family starts.
For weeks this project searched York and Kittery for Voudys before 1803 and found nothing, and the reason is simple: the Isles kept their own books.
Gosport had its own church register, running from 1732 to 1773, and its own town record book, running from 1730 into the 1800s. Neither is indexed under York, or Kittery, or any Maine town at all — the islands belonged to nobody's mainland. Both survive because a Pennsylvania doctor named Joseph Warren transcribed them and printed them in a genealogical journal in 1912 and 1913.
Sixty-four mentions of this family were sitting in one of those volumes the whole time.
The first of them the record shows is Matthew Voudey, and he arrives already a father. On 12 April 1732 the church register enters "Elias, s. of Matthew Voudey."
The town book fills in what the church book does not. In a section headed "An Account of the Bathes of their children and their Selfs" — births, in the clerk's spelling — the family register reads:
The Children of Mathew & Sarah Vowdy — Mary Vowdy born March 8th 1730 — Elius Vowdy born March 4th 1731.
Matthew's first wife was Sarah, and that entry is the only place her name survives. By 5 March 1737/38 he is styled a widower, and marries again — to Lydia, of the Currier family. Their son Edward Voudy was baptised at the Isles on 7 January 1738/39.
⚑ And look at whose names that family register sits between: the SHAPLEYS and the MUCHEMORES. These were not neighbours in the modern sense. On an island that size, everyone's births went into the same book, in the same hand, on the same page.
The same register carries the other half of this family. On 30 November 1737, "John Varrel & Rachel Sadler were Joyned in Marriage."
Their children were baptised at the Isles across the next twenty years — Mary, Sarah on 14 September 1740, Rachel, Susannah, Tryphena, Edward, John, Solomon on 10 April 1757, Richard, Abigail.
Sarah Varrell, baptised 14 September 1740, is the woman who married Edward Voudey on 1 December 1760. She was twenty.
And Rachel Sadler is the reason any of this can be proved. Fifty-six years later, on the mainland, her grandson William Voudy sold a house lot at York and described it in the deed as "the same that was purchased by my grandmother Rachel Varrill of Giles Scot." A name written down on a rock in 1737 turns up in a York registry of deeds in 1816, in the hand of a man who had never lived on the island.
Three weddings in twelve years show how tightly the place was bound.
(Which Sarah married Edward Currier is not settled and must not be guessed. And the Walpeys are a real Isles family in their own right — they are not the Talpeys of York, and the two must never be merged.)
Between 1773 and 1775 the Gosport town book puts Edward Voudy and his father-in-law John Varrell in office almost continuously.
That is the last firm date this family has at the Isles of Shoals. Five weeks later, Lexington.
The church register closes in 1774. The town book runs on — into a second printed volume covering 1801 to 1877 — and there is no Voudy in it at all.
The disappearance can be measured, because the same editor printed all three volumes and the surnames can be counted. Across the church register, the eighteenth-century town book, and the nineteenth-century town book:
| church reg. | town bk. to 1801 | town bk. 1801–1877 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| VOUDY | 17 | 1 | 0 |
| CURRIER | 79 | 14 | 0 |
| WALPEY | 6 | 1 | 0 |
| MUCHEMORE | 27 | 38 | 0 |
| CASWELL | 4 | 68 | 169 |
| RANDALL | 7 | 55 | 80 |
⭐ Read the last column. Voudy, Currier, Walpey and Muchemore all go to nothing, while Caswell stands at a hundred and sixty-nine and Randall at eighty. An older population leaves the island and a newer one takes it over. And the two families the Voudys married into — Currier and Walpey — vanish alongside them.
⚠ Two honest cautions on that table, because they matter. The three volumes are different kinds of record — a church register naturally holds more family names than a book of town votes — so only the comparison within the last column carries any weight. And these surnames drift in spelling across a century. This is an observation to test, not a proven exodus.
Nobody wrote down the crossing.
There is no passenger record, no removal, no deed of departure. What we have is a man in town office on Star Island in March 1775, an island evacuated in the war years, a family appearing in York deeds by the 1790s — and nothing whatever in between. Absence from a town book is not a departure. The move itself is undocumented and may always be.
There is one hint that it was gradual rather than sudden: the Varrells appear in York deed books from 1750 to 1755, twenty years before the last Gosport entry. The family may have had a foothold ashore long before it had a home there.
⭐ And the silence has one consequence that runs through everything else this family has written down. William Voudy — Edward and Sarah's son, and the man from whom the whole Maine line descends — was born about 1778, into exactly that gap. The church book had closed. The congregation had scattered. The York town book has been searched under eight spellings and he is not in it. He was never written down at all.
On 6 August 1800 the Reverend Jedidiah Morse of Charlestown landed at the Isles of Shoals, sent by the Society for Propagating the Gospel "to enquire into" the state of the place. He stayed five days.
His report described "the destitute & wretched situation of the inhabitants as to religious & moral instruction." Inside that five-day stay he married the couples who had been living together for years with no minister to marry them, and he left the island a small library: six Bibles, twelve Testaments, twenty-four spelling books, twelve primers, wall catechisms, sermons, psalm books and a geography.
No Voudy is named anywhere in it. By 1800 they were gone.
Of the neighbouring island the Gosport material says flatly that Hog Island, now called Appledore, "was entirely deserted."
The Isles are the Voudy and Varrell story. They are not the Dudley one.
That was tested rather than assumed. The Isles church register has a distinctive way of writing — "Joyned in Marriage," "were Baptiz'd," "Datr of" — and four hundred and nine such entries were located and each one searched for the name Dudley within four hundred characters either side. There is no Dudley at the Isles of Shoals.
John H. Dudley of Kittery, who married Lydia Jane Voudy, came from somewhere else entirely. When those two married, two quite separate histories met — and only one of them began on a rock nine miles out to sea.
Documented, at the Isles: from 1730 to 1775. Forty-five years of one family on one island, in two books that nobody on the mainland ever indexed — a father and his first wife Sarah, a widower's second marriage, eight children, three weddings into the neighbours' families, and a man who sat as selectman and sealer of wood right up to the spring the war began.
Then a silence nobody recorded, and a boy born inside it.
Everything after — the deeds at York, the crew lists, the nine acres by Harmon's Island, the sealing voyage to South Georgia, the marriage at Kittery in 1861 — comes down from a family that started out on a rock, kept its own books because no one else would, and then walked out of them.
The Isles of Shoals church register, 1732–1773 — "Church Membership, Marriages, and Baptisms on the Isles of Shoals in the Eighteenth Century," contributed by Joseph W. Warren M.D. and printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 66 (1912), in three instalments. Machine-read across the whole volume; sixty-four hits on the family surnames. V-55, V-56, X-GOSPORTCHURCH, X-GOSPORTCOV.
The Gosport town records, 1730–1800 — the same editor, Register volume 67 (1913), in four instalments; and the continuation covering 1801–1877 in volume 68. V-57, V-59, V-62, X-GOSPORT1858.
The family registers of Matthew and Sarah Vowdy, entered in the town book beside the Shapleys and the Muchemores. V-60.
The marriages — Edward Voudey and Sarah Varrell, 1 December 1760 (V-53); Edward Currier and Sarah Voudey, 18 February 1761 (V-63); Joseph Walpey and Susanna Voudey, 25 May 1772 (V-64); and the caution that the Walpeys are not the Talpeys (V-65). Baptisms read in the original manuscript hand at V-271.
The town offices, 1773–1775 — selectman, the Jamaica fish notes, the minister's salary, and the sealer of wood. V-58, V-59, X-GOSPORTORIG.
The disappearance — the surname counts across the three printed volumes, with their confounds stated; and the controlled negative showing no Voudy in the volume covering 1801–1877. X-COHORT, X-VOUDYGONE.
The birth that was never recorded — why no record of William Voudy's birth exists or ever did. X-VOUDYBIRTHGAP, X-SPELLSWEEP-YORK.
Jedidiah Morse's visit, 6–10 August 1800, with his report and the list of books he left. V-61.
Appledore — the "entirely deserted" passage, retrieved and read whole. X-APPLEDORE, with the standing caution that there are two Hog Islands at X-2HOGISLANDS.
No Dudleys at the Isles — a controlled negative with a working control, run two independent ways. X-ISLESDUD.
The Varrells ashore at York from 1750 — the eighteenth-century York deed volumes. X-VARRELL18, D-60.
V-57, X-VARRELL18, D-60, X-VOUDYBIRTHGAP, X-SPELLSWEEP-YORK, D-07.02-the-ground.md · do not edit this file —
edit the Markdown and re-run md2html.py