What this is. A thread running two hundred years: in this family it is repeatedly the women who hold the property and sign the paper — widows administering estates, wives buying land in their own names, daughters conveying farms.
Why it matters. It is not a modern reading imposed on old documents. It is what the documents say, in the clerk's own words, over and over.
The very first person this archive can reach is a woman doing business.
Go as far back as the documents go — past the mariners, past the Revolution, past the Isles of Shoals — and you arrive on 10 December 1694 at a deed of sale, and the person selling the land is:
Elizabeth Adams, relict and administratrix unto Phillip Adams late of York deceased
Six pounds in current money of New England, paid by Joannah Livingstone of York. Philip Adams is the earliest man in this family the record touches, and the only reason we know he existed is that his widow sold his land. Sixteen years later she made a will of her own.
That turns out to be the pattern, not the exception.
23 September 1763. William Booker of York dies without a will, leaving nine children, the youngest — Aaron — five years old.
Somebody has to be bonded to administer an intestate estate, and the York probate file has who it was:
Dorcas Booker, prinsabel [principal], and Samuel Moor and Jacob Booker, all of York, surties… holden and stand firmly bound… in the full and just sum of fifty pounds, lawful money
The widow took it on herself, in fifty pounds, and one of the two men who put their names behind her was her own father.
She was still alive eleven years later. When Samuel Moore made his will in February 1774 he wrote "item, to my daughter Dorcas Booker, I give five shillings."
4 July 1765, and the other Booker widow is doing the hardest job in the family's history.
Anne Booker of Boston, widow and administratrix of the estate of John Booker, acting under an order of the Superior Court of Judicature sitting at Boston, conveys the family's oldest ground to the highest bidder at public vendue for forty-two pounds:
the whole of the said deceased's real estate situate in York… being part of the lands on which he formerly lived on the south west side of York River, formerly called his homestead**
A widow, in another town, under a court order, auctioning off the ground her husband's family had held since the town proprietors granted it. Somebody had to do it, and the deed says who.
Out on the mainland the Varrell women leave a trail of their own.
Rachel (Sadler) Varrell — married at the Isles of Shoals on 30 November 1737 — bought a lot at York from a man named Giles Scot. Later, widowed, she made a deed of gift out of "the love and affection that I have and bear towards my daughter Sarah Vowdy the wife of Edward Vowdy of the same York, fisherman."
She died a widow and intestate, and on 20 October 1806 the Court of Probate granted administration of her estate.
⭐ And here is what makes her different from most eighteenth-century women in any archive: she is named, by a descendant, in a public record, fifty-odd years on. In 1816 her grandson William Voudy sold that same lot and wrote into the deed that it was
the same that was purchased by my grandmother Rachel Varrill of Giles Scot
A woman's purchase, remembered by name in a registry of deeds two generations later. It is the sentence that lets this family trace the Varrell and Sadler line at all.
25 September 1811. Sarah Voudy of York, widow — Rachel's daughter, Edward's wife — makes her will and disposes of everything she has.
One dollar each to her daughters Rachel and Lydia. Her wearing apparel to Polly. And the whole of the rest, real and personal, to her son William, whom she names sole executor.
She was dead within two years. Five years after that, William was selling her house lot and reciting his mother and grandmother by name in the deed.
When Aaron Booker mortgaged his nine acres in 1817 to William Voudy — the husband of Dorcas Booker, and his son-in-law on inference rather than on any document — and never redeemed them, the farm did not simply pass to a man.
The deed of 1848, recorded in 1868, conveys the land to a son while reserving, in the grantor's own words, the complete possession, improvement and profits
to myself and to my wife DORCAS VOUDY during my life and her life… the same as if this deed had not been made
Her life, named, on equal terms with his. And that 1868 instrument is the only document anywhere that names Aaron Booker and Dorcas Voudy in the same sentence — the closest this project has come to proving she was his daughter.
⚠ One honest note about her. Whether Dorcas could write her own name is genuinely disputed inside this project's own files — one document of ours says she signed the 1816 deed, another says she made a mark. It has not been resolved, and it will not be guessed at here.
31 March 1873, and this is the sharpest one.
in consideration of ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS paid by LYDIA J. DUDLEY of Kittery aforesaid, MARRIED WOMAN… do hereby give, grant, bargain, sell and convey unto the said Lydia J. Dudley, her heirs and assigns forever, a lot of land situated in said Kittery with the buildings thereon**
A thousand dollars — the largest single sum anywhere in this family's papers — and her husband is not a party to it. The clerk wrote married woman because that is precisely what mattered: this is a deliberate use of the married women's property law, which was new.
It explains something that had puzzled this project for months. John H. Dudley never bought, sold or mortgaged land in York County under his own name across a hundred and twenty-five years of records. Not because the family had nothing. Because it was hers.
Seven years later, when a house at Kittery burned on the morning of 28 October 1880, three separate newspapers named the owner and every one of them said Lydia J. Dudley. Not one of them mentioned a husband. And when that acre was finally sold in 1883, the grantors were the widow and her two sons.
Edward Schmidt died in July 1881, leaving four children, a house on the Navy Yard road and debts.
In December the Probate Court appointed Mary C. Schmidt administratrix. She swore the oath to the inventory on 7 April 1882. And on 5 December 1882 she resigned the trust in a petition that says exactly why, and signs itself:
The undersigned who was appointed Administratrix of the Estate of Edward H. Schmidt… and having since said appointment married, hereby respectfully resigns said trust. — Mrs M. C. Tucker.**
Thirty years later, at seventy-one, she was still at it — swearing a declaration for a widow's pension on the strength of a naval service that had ended in 1864. It was refused.
Elizabeth Adams, 1694. Dorcas Booker, 1763. Anne Booker, 1765. Rachel Varrell, before 1806. Sarah Voudy, 1811. Dorcas Voudy, 1848 (recorded 1868). Lydia Dudley, 1873. Mary Schmidt, 1882.
Nearly two hundred years, and eight women whose names are on the operative documents.
It is not a coincidence and it is not sentiment. The men of this family were at sea. A mariner gone four months to the West Indies, or two years to South Georgia, cannot appear at a probate court or acknowledge a deed before a justice of the peace. So the women did, and that is why so much of what survives about this family survives in their names rather than their husbands'.
The absence of the men from the land records is not a gap in the evidence. It is a picture of who was at home.
D-131, PR-WMBOOKER, PR-SAMMOORE, D-07, D-29, D-44, D-34, N-02, D-43, F-43, D-146, B-26, V-386.08-the-women.md · do not edit this file —
edit the Markdown and re-run md2html.py