Who he is. Aaron Booker of York is, on the evidence, the father of Dorcas Booker — who married William Voudy, whose daughter Lydia Jane married John Dudley, whose daughter Mary Catherine married Edward Schmidt. That would make him Mary Catherine's great-grandfather. ⚠ It is the one link in this family's Maine ancestry that no document states outright, so read him as the strongest candidate rather than a settled fact.
Where. York village, and a nine-acre farm on the south side of the York river — land we can stand next to in September.
He was five years old when his father died, and his mother went to court and took charge.
Aaron Booker was born at York on Saturday, 19 August 1758 — the last of the nine children of William Booker and Dorcas Moore. We know the day because the town clerk wrote down the weekday for every one of those nine children, and the calendar still checks out two and a half centuries later.
On 23 September 1763 his father died without a will. In an intestate estate with nine children, someone had to be bonded to administer it, and the person who was is his widow: "Dorcas Booker, prinsabel" — fifty pounds lawful money, with two men standing surety behind her. One of them was Samuel Moor, her own father.
She was still living eleven years later. When Samuel Moore made his will on 7 February 1774 he wrote "item, to my daughter Dorcas Booker, I give five shillings." Aaron was fifteen.
That is the whole of his childhood as the records have it: a father gone at five, a mother who handled it herself, and a grandfather close enough to put his name on her bond.
In the last days of January 1776 he walked out of York as a volunteer. He enlisted as a private in the militia company of Captain Abel Moulton of York, with Josiah Bragdon of York as lieutenant, and marched with them to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served the two months he had signed for, in Cambridge and Dorchester and the towns adjacent.
Which put him in exactly the right place in exactly the right month.
Through the night of the fourth of March the American army dragged its guns onto Dorchester Heights above Boston harbour. The British woke to find the town under them. Eleven days later the fleet sailed out of Boston and did not come back. Fifty-six years afterwards, an old man in a sickbed at York put it in one plain clause: he "was at Dorchester when the British army evacuated Boston in March 1776."
He went back that August. Four months this time, in the company of Captain Samuel Leighton of Kittery — Bragdon again the first lieutenant — marching again to Dorchester, and discharged there in December 1776. "Colonel Francis commanded the Regiment," he said. "The last four months service was, I think, in the Continental service in the Massachusetts line."
He never got a piece of paper for any of it. "I never received a written discharge from the service, have no documentary evidence of my enlistments and service."
Two years later he married. He and Anne Ellingwood, both of York, entered their intention with the town clerk on 9 October 1778, and the minister of the parish married them on 16 February 1779. Aaron was twenty.
What followed was fifty years of an unremarkable life on the same ground, which is the hardest kind of life to see. We can see the edges of it. He farmed nine acres on the south side of York River, at the cove that separates Harmon's Island from the mainland — the highway on two sides, the water on the third, the heirs of Josiah Weeks on the fourth.
On 17 November 1817 he mortgaged all of it. Every acre, and the buildings on it, to William Voudy of York, mariner — Dorcas Booker's husband, and on the strongest reading of this archive his son-in-law, though as the foot of this page says no document states it — for forty-three dollars and thirteen cents, with five years to pay the note.
Set that against the market. Five years earlier another York mariner had paid seventy dollars for a single acre at Sewall's Bridge. Aaron Booker put nine acres and a house behind a note for less than two-thirds of that.
He signed it Aaron ✗ Booker. He could not write his name.
And it was not the only time. On 20 December 1819, two years later, he mortgaged again — this time to William Booker of Portsmouth, chaise maker. Whether the borrowing was need or a family arrangement, the deeds do not say; what they show is a man in his sixties raising money twice in two years against the only thing he owned.
And once, fifteen years before the first mortgage, the record shows him in front of a magistrate.
On 15 October 1804, at Justice Daniel Sewall's own dwelling house in York, Aaron Booker of York, yeoman, was brought on the complaint of John Sewall of Hallowell, gentleman — ninety miles up the coast — for a barrel, full trimmed with bound hoops, of the value of two dollars, taken from the south-west end of the lower bridge over York River some time between the 19th of September and the 5th of October. The barrel had been found in his possession.
"To which charge the said Aaron pleads, and says that thereof he is not guilty."
The Justice examined the complainant and one other witness and found against him. The sentence was three dollars to John Sewall — treble the value, the barrel itself being returned — a fine of fifty cents to the Commonwealth, and the costs of the prosecution, taxed at four dollars and ninety-two cents; "and stand committed till sentence be performed."
The arithmetic is written in the margin of the page: 8.42. And beneath it, in the clerk's hand:
"Mem.o The said Booker neglecting to pay the above sums; a mittimus is made out for committing him to gaol."
⚑ Two things are worth saying about that, and neither is an excuse. He was forty-six years old and twenty-six years married, and he pleaded not guilty. And it was not the theft that gaoled him — it was the costs. The barrel was worth two dollars; the prosecution's costs came to nearly two and a half times its value, and he could not find eight dollars and forty-two cents.
⭐ It also corroborates, from a fourth direction, what everything else about this household already says. A probate index that shows an estate never settled. Two mortgages of the same nine acres for forty-odd dollars. A pension declaration sworn at his bedside because he was too sick to come to court. And a commitment to gaol for want of $8.42. (Maine was still part of Massachusetts in 1804 — hence "the Commonwealth.")
⚠ And the place is the same place. Aaron's farm lay on the south side of York River. The bridge he took the barrel from was a bridge over his own river.
B-28 — Daniel Sewall's justice record book, York Court Records 1796–1834, read at the image at magnification.
In August 1820 the census taker counted his house. Four people: one man over forty-five — Aaron himself, sixty-two — one woman over forty-five, and a son and a daughter, both between sixteen and twenty-five. Neither child is named. It is the only direct sight this project has of Aaron Booker's household, and it puts two grown children under his roof at a time when Dorcas was already seventeen years married and living down the road.
In 1832 Congress finally pensioned the old soldiers, and on 17 August — two days before his seventy-fourth birthday — William A. Hayes, Judge of Probate for York County, came to the house, because Aaron Booker was "sick and unable to attend court." He was sworn at his own bedside, and he told the whole of it from memory: the captains, the lieutenant, the marches, the month at Dorchester. Then:
I then resided in said York, the place of my nativity, and have ever since resided in that town.
The pension was granted. File S. 30,878.
There is one soft spot in it, and it is worth telling because it is so human. He said he was seventy-eight. In 1837 he said eighty-four; the 1840 census of pensioners printed him at eighty-nine. He was in fact seventy-three, seventy-eight and eighty-one. Aaron Booker did not know how old he was, and no one around him did either. The York town register knew, and had known since the week he was born.
On 28 March 1837 he was called on again — not for himself this time, but for a neighbour's widow. John Baker of York had died a pensioner, and his wife needed someone to swear she had been his wife. Aaron Booker, aged eighty-four by his own count, gave the deposition: he had been born in York and never lived anywhere else, and had "always lived in the immediate neighbourhood of said Baker." He remembered Mary Rhodes visiting her sister before the war. He remembered their children's names.
At the bottom of that sheet, on the right, is Aaron ✗ Booker. On the left, in a clean hand, is the signature of the witness: William Voudy.
Two ancestors of this family, on one piece of paper, on one day in March.
By 1840 he had given up the farm entirely. The printed federal census of Revolutionary pensioners that year has three columns — the pensioner, his age, and the head of the household he was living in. The line reads: Aaron Booker — 89 — William Voudy. He had moved in with his daughter and her husband.
He died in 1845, having lived his entire life inside the bounds of one town. The federal pension ledger records a final payment in March 1845 — a pensioner's payments stop when he does — and that is the whole of the documentary evidence for his death. The exact date of 28 May 1845 that circulates online comes from a family tree, not from a record, and this project has not found the record behind it.
Three years later William Voudy sold the nine acres on to his own son Reuben for two hundred dollars, describing them in the deed as "the same that was formerly owned by Aaron Booker dec.d," and reserving the use of the place for his own lifetime and that of his wife Dorcas. The farm stayed in the family. Only the name came off it.
He left no letters, no diary, and not one line in his own hand. Everything we have of Aaron Booker he said out loud to a clerk, who wrote it down and pushed the page across for a cross. And three separate times across five years — at seventy-three, at seventy-eight, and at eighty-one — the thing he chose to say was the same: I was born in York, and I have never lived anywhere else.
Two things not established. His death date. See above: a final pension payment in March 1845 is all we have. A York town death entry, a gravestone, or the administration of his estate would settle it.
His daughter. No document yet found states that Dorcas Booker, who married William Voudy in 1803, was Aaron Booker's daughter. The case for it is strong — the same small town, the right generation, her birthplace given as York, and a lifetime of dealing between the two men ending with Aaron living under William's roof — but it is an inference, and the whole Booker, Moore and Ellingwood ancestry rests on it.
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