Who he is. Solomon was a brother of Sarah Varrell, who married Edward Voudy — which puts him on the Voudy side of the family, a great-grand-uncle of Lydia Jane Voudy, the woman at the centre of this reunion. ⚑ Unlike most joints in this archive, that one is documented: the Isles of Shoals register baptises both of them to the same parents.
Where. He was baptised on the Isles of Shoals, the cluster of rocks nine miles off Portsmouth you can see from the coast on a clear day. He lived at New Castle, New Hampshire, at the mouth of Portsmouth harbour, and then at York.
Twenty-three records in this archive name Solomon Varrell, and every one of the twenty-three has been read on the original page image. Not indexed, not taken on trust — opened and read.
A deed of January 1755 shows a Solomon Varrell of Rye, New Hampshire buying land at Braveboat Harbour. For a while it looked like ours.
It cannot be. Ours was baptised at the Isles of Shoals on 10 April 1757, son of John Varrel and Rachel Sadler. In January 1755 he had not been born — and that baptism had been sitting in this project's own files the whole time, unchecked, while the doubt was being written up as a hunch.
⭐ So the 1755 buyer is an older Varrell, unidentified, and very probably the man ours was named after. Two men, one name, one coastline: the commonest way a family tree goes wrong.
His father bought into York in 1778 from a sailmaker named William Hunt. The year after, Solomon turns up somewhere nobody expected: a list of ratepayers for the town of New Castle, New Hampshire, dated 31 December 1779. Solomon Varrell, rated 10.17.0.
⭐ The Varrells are not only a Maine family. He was paying tax in a New Hampshire town at twenty-two.
Then, at York:
SOLOMON VARRELL and MARY MOORE both of York intend Marriage — Enter.d June 3.d 1780.
And on the same line, an erasure — the marriage record scraped off the paper. ⚑ Not damage, and not somebody hiding something: every erased York marriage entry this project has examined turns out to be the clerk tidying his own book, eight times out of eight. The wedding itself had to be found in a different volume, the minister's own register: June 27 1780 — Solomon Varrel & Mary More.
⭐ Note the bride's name. Forty-six years later a William Varrell married a Sophia Moore at York. Varrell and Moore married each other at least twice, in two different generations — which is how families in a small town actually work.
In 1799 his widowed mother Rachel sold him the family land for eighty dollars. She names her late husband in the deed and cites the 1778 purchase herself, by book and page — a widow carrying the chain of title in her head. And the deed places Solomon's own house already standing on the land.
The deeds call him a mariner, and in 1802 the Probate Court agreed in the most practical way available: when a York man died owning a ship, the court sent Solomon to put a value on the brig. They did not send farmers to do that.
He made his will in June 1819. By November he was dead, and the court issued two documents on the same day.
The first orders three York mariners to value his estate — including
a schedule of notes of hand and balances adjusted, to be shewn you by John Varrell, executor of the will…
⭐ A note of hand is an IOU. These were debts owed to him. He died not as a man settling up, but as a man who had been lending money out.
The second appoints his widow Mary guardian of their two youngest sons, "minors, upwards of fourteen years of age, pursuant to their choice." Boys over fourteen chose their own guardian under that law — and the court wrote down that they chose their mother.
His eldest daughter was baptised in 1781 under a name first read as Mable and re-read, at high magnification, as MOLLE — Molly, an old familiar for Mary. She married Josiah Clark and lies in a York burying ground: d. 19 Jan 1861, aged 79 yrs. The arithmetic matches to the year.
p06-solomon-varrell.md · do not edit this file —
edit the Markdown and re-run md2html.py