Who she is. Lucy Booker was, on the evidence below, a sister of Dorcas Booker — which would make her an aunt of Lydia Jane Voudy, the York girl who married John Dudley and whose daughter Mary married Edward Schmidt. If you are a Schmidt, she is family by a few removes. If the sisterhood does not hold, she is still a York neighbour who lived a story worth telling.
Where. York village and Kittery, four miles apart across the same stretch of coast we are walking in September.
Between 1818 and 1837, Lucy Booker's name went into the marriage intention books of York and Kittery nine times, against six different men.
She married the sixth.
Before a wedding in Maine you could not simply turn up at a church. The couple's intention had to be published — written into the town book by the clerk and read out in public, so that anyone with a reason to object could say so. Both partners' towns entered it. After a waiting period the clerk issued a certificate, and then you married.
So an entry in these books is not a wedding. It is an announcement that one is coming. Most of them are followed, a line or two later, by the marriage.
Hers are not.
March 1818 — Peter Tobey of Kittery. Nothing follows.
January 1822 — Peter Tobey again, four years later, the same man. And on that day, something worth standing still for. Immediately above her entry, in the same clerk's hand:
M.r Joshua Bridges Jun.r and Miss Hannah Booker both of York intend marriage — Entered January 18. 1822 — Certificate issued Feb. 23.d 1822
M.r Peter Tobey of Kittery and Miss Lucy Booker of York intend marriage — Entered January 18. 1822.
Two Booker women walked into the clerk's office together that day. Hannah's entry has a certificate and she married in February. Lucy's has nothing after it.
⭐ Two women publishing on the same day is how this project identifies sisters — it is one of its working rules — and it is a large part of why Hannah and Lucy are believed to be daughters of Aaron Booker, and therefore why this page belongs here at all.
November 1823 — Daniel Daley of Kittery.
December 1824 — over in Kittery's own book, on a page nobody had opened until last month: "Amos Pickernell & Lucy Booker both of Kittery." ⚑ Seven months earlier the same book called her of York. She had moved towns — and she is still a Booker, which is the point. Had the Daley announcement become a wedding she would have been Lucy Daley by December.
1826 — Ivory Bridges. ⭐ Her sister had married Joshua Bridges. Two sisters, two Bridges men.
About 1830 — Noah Kimball, "a resident in Kittery, formerly of Lyman."
March 1837 — Samuel Carr of the County of Caladonia, State of Vermont, and now a resident in Maine. Certificate on 10 April. Married 12 April 1837 — nineteen years and one month after Peter Tobey.
There is an obvious objection: perhaps she married one of them quietly somewhere, and the later entries are a different woman.
The clerk answers it in one word. In 1837, at about forty, she is written Miss Lucy Booker — and in that period Miss meant never married, while a widow or a remarried woman was written Mrs.
⭐ That distinction is not an assumption. On a leaf of the same film a bride appears as Mrs Joanna S. Junkins, while every other bride on that same page is Miss, written out in full — five of them, in a row, for contrast. The clerk knew exactly what he was doing.
⛔ So Lucy Booker should never be recorded as the wife of Tobey, Daley, Pickernell, Bridges or Kimball. Every one of those is an announcement and none of them is a marriage. Online family trees are full of the opposite mistake.
⚠ And there were two Lucy Bookers in York. The 1820 census shows a Wid. Lucy Booker heading her own household — but the age columns, checked against Aaron Booker's household nine lines below on the same sheet, make her an older woman with a teenage boy in the house. A woman written Miss in 1818, 1822 and again in 1837 is not that widow.
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