What this is. Not our direct ancestors, but their town and their neighbours — two York women who stopped their own weddings after the announcement had been made, and had the clerk write it into the book.
Why it is here. These are the same pages, the same clerk and the same years as our own family's marriage entries, and they show what those books actually recorded when things did not go to plan.
In the York town book for the second of October 1790, an ordinary line:
Thomas Stevens of Wells & Elizabeth Averel of York Intend Marriage, entred October 2.d 1790
And underneath it, squeezed into the strip between the ruled lines, in the clerk's own hand and the same ink:
FORBIDEN BY ELIZABETH AVERIL
She stopped it herself, and the clerk wrote down that she was the one who did.
Before a couple could be married in eighteenth-century Massachusetts — and York was Massachusetts then — they had to enter an intention with the town clerk. He wrote it in the book, and the banns were published: read out, three times, in public.
The point of publishing was to give anybody an opportunity to object. A parent could stop it. A guardian could. A creditor could. So could either of the two people getting married.
Most intentions simply went through, and the clerk ticked them off. But the York book records at least fifteen distinct ways one could fail, and the clerk wrote the reason in plain words each time.
Forbidden by her father. 16 May 1747:
John Garey jun.r and Mary Shaw both of York intend Marriage. Ented May 16.th 1747. Forbid by her father and so never published.**
Never published — so there was no marriage. ⭐ And note what that entry hands us for nothing: it proves Mary Shaw's father was alive on that date and states outright that he was her father. A forbidding is a parentage record.
Forbidden by the town. 13 May 1749, an intention marked:
Forbid by ye Selectmen of ye Poor of the town of York
The town could stop a wedding it expected to cost it money. Under the poor laws a couple likely to fall on the parish were a liability, and the selectmen could refuse to let them become one.
Forbidden by the groom's own father. 18 January 1755, and this one gives up a piece of the clerk's private vocabulary:
John Junkins & Eunice Young both of York intend marriage entred Jan.y 18. 1755. NEVER CUT publishd being forbid by s.d Junkins['] father Alex.r Junkins.
⭐ "Never cut." When an intention was discharged — when the wedding actually happened — this clerk struck the entry out of the live list. Here he notes that this one was never cut, because it never got that far. That single phrase is the clerk explaining his own filing system, and it settled an argument this project had been having with itself for weeks.
Out of everything in that book, two entries name a woman as the person who stopped her own wedding.
Elizabeth Averel, 2 October 1790 — the entry at the top of this page.
And Lucy Tinnum, 30 August 1796:
Benjamin Welch jun.r & Lucy Tinnum, both of York, intends Marriage entered August 30 1796 FORBIDDEN BY LUCY TINNUM — (The Bans)
⭐ Read how carefully the clerk put it. Not forbidden. Not forbidden by her father. Not forbidden by the parties. "Forbidden by Lucy Tinnum." He had a whole vocabulary of failure available to him and he chose the one that named her.
An eighteenth-century woman stood up, in her own town, and stopped her own banns — and the record says so in five words.
She married five years later, and this time it went through.
On 5 December 1801 the clerk entered:
Nehemiah Booker, and Lucy Tinnum, both of York, intend, Marriage entered Dec.r 5.th 1801
And on the closing rule of that entry sits a hatched cross, a tick, and — in a thin later hand — "Dec 14 by Rev Isaac Lyman."
The minister's own register agrees, in his own book, in his own hand:
December 14th 1801 — Nehemiah Booker & Lucy Tinnam**
Nine days from intention to wedding. She had said no in public in August 1796, and in December 1801 she said yes to a Booker.
⚠ Which Nehemiah Booker is not settled, and this project will not guess. Aaron Booker had a brother Nehemiah, born at York on 7 November 1755 — who would be forty-six in 1801. A son of Aaron born in the early 1780s would be about twenty. The name, the town and the arithmetic all fit more than one man, and nothing yet read decides between them.
There is a mark under nearly every entry in that book — a tick, sometimes with a hatch beside it. For a long time this project read those marks as evidence a marriage had gone ahead, and read the gaps and scrapes around them as erasures, as though somebody had gone through the register destroying records.
Elizabeth Averel and Lucy Tinnum killed that idea between them.
Both of their entries carry a single clean tick. Both of those weddings certainly did not happen — the clerk says so on the same line. So the tick cannot mean married. It is simply the mark of an entry the clerk had finished with, whichever way it went.
Two women who refused to marry, two hundred and thirty years ago, are the reason this archive reads its own evidence correctly today.
X-LANGTONTEST, B-26.06-forbidden.md · do not edit this file —
edit the Markdown and re-run md2html.py