Who he is. William Voudy married Dorcas Booker at York in 1803 and was the father of Lydia Jane Voudy, who married John Dudley — making him Mary Catherine (Dudley) Schmidt's grandfather, and the man through whom the Voudy, Varrell and Sadler lines reach us.
Where. York, Maine. His own people came from the Isles of Shoals, the rocks nine miles off Portsmouth you can see from the coast on a clear day.
There is no record of his birth, and there never was one.
That is not a search failure. William Voudy was born into a hole in the record, and we know exactly how the hole was made. His family lived nine miles out to sea on the Isles of Shoals, where the Reverend John Tucke had faithfully entered every baptism since 1729 — including those of William's older brothers and sisters. That register closes in 1774. His father Edward Voudy was still serving as a Gosport town officer on Star Island on 11 March 1775, five weeks before Lexington. Within the year the Isles were evacuated and the congregation scattered.
William was born about 1778, to a refugee family, in the three years after the institution that would have written him down ceased to exist. The York town book has been searched under eight spellings. He is not in it, and he never was.
What is missing is a birth date. Not a parent.
His mother and father could not write their names.
On 10 May 1803 Edward Voudy sold his son a piece of land for a hundred and forty dollars, and the signature block of that deed is the plainest thing in this whole story: "Edward H. Voudy" — his mark. "Sarah ✗ Voudy" — her mark. Neither of them could sign.
The son they were conveying to is already styled, in the body of the deed, William Voudy of York, mariner.
That October he went to be married, and the record fails him again.
On 6 October 1803 the York town clerk entered: "William Voudy and Dorcas [Booker] both of York intend marriage." Beneath it he made a tick, and left the rest of the line blank.
⚑ That blank is worth pausing on, because the same clerk on the same page was doing better for other people. Two entries above the Voudys, for a couple whose intention was entered ten days earlier, he wrote across the line in his smaller hand: married November 1803, by — and named the man who performed it. He recorded the wedding date and the officiant for the neighbours. For William Voudy and Dorcas Booker he recorded nothing.
No marriage record for them has ever been found. What we have is the intention, and fifty-five years of two people living as husband and wife in the public record.
In 1811 his mother made her will and put everything in his hands. Sarah Voudy of York, widow, left 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 named sole executor. She was dead within two years.
And then he did something neither of his parents could have done. On 2 April 1816 he sold that house lot to James Newbury of York, calker, for ninety dollars, and wrote his family's history into the deed:
…being the same that was purchased by my grandmother Rachel Varrill of Giles Scot, and left me by will of my mother Sally Voudy.
Three generations, named, in a recorded public instrument, by a man whose parents made crosses. That single sentence is why this family can trace the Varrell and Sadler line at all.
In 1817 he became the man with money. On the seventeenth of November Aaron Booker — his wife Dorcas's father on the strongest reading here, and on no document that says so — mortgaged him the whole of a nine-acre farm on the south side of York River — every acre, the buildings, down to the cove that separates Harmon's Island from the mainland — for forty-three dollars and thirteen cents. Aaron signed it Aaron ✗ Booker.
Thirteen years later he was the man who needed it. On 24 May 1830 he mortgaged his own dwelling house and a lot of fifteen square rods for eighty-one dollars. The deed locates the Voudy homestead by its neighbours — Parrott, Joseph Kingsbury, James Donnell — which is how we know where he actually lived.
On 28 March 1837 the two men appear on one sheet of paper.
A neighbour's widow needed someone to swear she had been a wife, and Aaron Booker, aged eighty-four, gave the deposition. At the foot of it, on the right, is Aaron ✗ Booker. On the left, in a clean and confident hand, is the witness: William Voudy.
(The machine transcript renders that signature "Williams his Nancy." It does not say that. The image, read at magnification, says William Voudy — the capital V and the looped terminal y this project knows from twenty York deeds.)
Three years later the old man moved in. The printed federal census of Revolutionary pensioners for 1 June 1840 has three columns, and the line reads: Aaron Booker — 89 — William Voudy.
The farm went to his son, and he kept the use of it. He conveyed the nine acres to Reuben Voudy, mariner, for two hundred dollars — reserving to himself "and to my wife Dorcas Voudy during my life and her life" the complete possession, improvement and profits of the place, "the same as if this deed had not been made." The deed was executed and acknowledged on 11 April 1848 and not put on record until 5 September 1868 — one instrument, not two — and it describes the land as "the same that was formerly owned by Aaron Booker dec.d." ⭐ The reservation names her, so Dorcas was living on 11 April 1848. ⛔ The 1868 date is the Register of Deeds’ receipt and is evidence of nothing about who was then alive.
⭐ That 1848 deed is the single most important document this family owns, and not for the land. It is the only instrument anywhere that names Aaron Booker and Dorcas Voudy together — a woman holding a life estate in the farm of the man we believe was her father.
The census of 1850 shows the household at its fullest: William Voudy, 70, fisherman, four hundred dollars of real estate; Dorcas, 64; their married son Reuben, 25, farmer, with his wife Sarah and their baby George.
In 1854 he went to court as a grandfather. "I William Vondy of York" petitioned the York County Probate Court on 4 February, representing that his daughter Paulina M. Whittier had died on 11 February 1853, "leaving two children Mary Gertrude now aged eight years, and Arethusa aged six." Their father, he told the court, was "absent in California." It was 1854; the goldfields had taken him and the girls needed a guardian. The court appointed one.
By 1860 there was nothing left to count. On 2 July the enumerator found William Voudy, 82, and Dorcas, 64, living alone. No occupation. No real estate. No personal estate. Nothing in any column. Two doors down the road, in dwelling 567, was their son William Voudy Junior, 53, fisherman.
⛔ The deed that records them both was not entered in the register until September 1868 — twenty years after they signed it. That is a filing date, not a life date. They executed it on 11 April 1848. The census of 1860 is the last time either of them is seen.
After that the record lets him go as quietly as it took him up. Maine kept no statewide death registration until 1892. No probate was opened for him; a search of his son's later deeds for an heirs' partition — the kind of document that names every surviving child — found a routine fifty-dollar sale and no division at all. No death date, no burial place, no stone.
He entered the world in a gap in the record and left through another one. In between, this man whose mother and father could not write their own names put his signature on deed after deed, executed his mother's will, witnessed his father-in-law's oath, and told a probate judge where his granddaughters' father had gone.
He is the reason we can see any of them.
p02-william-voudy.md · do not edit this file —
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